As Jules Halpern Associates LLC embarks on its 13th year, it is a perfect time to take stock of our original mission and review our history.
When I founded our firm in 2004, the goal was to create a boutique law firm where clients could obtain sensible, creative solutions to their labor and employment issues, so that senior executives could concentrate on their core business. Our aim was to provide a small firm alternative to established firms and “big law” by delivering expert counsel with more personalized service. The firm’s emphasis was, and continues to be, that strong, preventive lawyering is the best approach to controlling legal fees and avoiding workplace disputes, government audits, and investigations. We work with profit and not-for-profit clients, both large and small, in a variety of settings and cultures.
My professional career began in large corporations, first as in-house employment counsel, then HR consultant, Human Resources executive, and finally, founding our law firm in 2004. My diversified background empowers our firm to communicate with clients in a language and style they readily understand and can apply to their daily challenges.
On a personal level, for the last 10 years I have delivered formal lectures to executives currently “in transition” at the world’s leading outplacement firm. It has been my privilege to de-mystify employment and consulting agreements, thus assisting these employees in landing suitable positions that match their many talents and life experiences.
We have maximized our HR law training experience to provide our clients with ongoing anti-harassment, management, and other compliance-related training. In these lively training sessions, we mentor and share with our clients the practical, anecdotal experience we have amassed from our organizational and private law firm experiences. We deliver the training message using practitioners’ real-life examples that resonate with our participants.
We set out in 2006 to publish our own monthly newsletter, of which we are especially proud, so that our growing client base could stay abreast of workplace legal developments. There are few boutique law firms that publish their own original newsletter, and ours reaches almost 2000 colleagues, clients and friends of the firm. In addition to our newsletter, we began preparing a regular blog in January 2015. Each month we look forward with a renewed sense of purpose to the writing and disseminating of our publication’s fresh content. The several hundreds of interesting articles are easily retrievable on our website by clicking on JHA Articles here or on our homepage.
Our firm has evolved to meet the changing compliance landscape and be responsive to our clients’ growing needs. We represent clients in employment disputes and litigation. Our law firm capitalized on our human resources and corporate culture experience to conduct confidential, complicated, high-level, internal investigations of discrimination for high-profile clients. As an independent investigator for management, we balance both the need for sensitivity with the clear goal of synthesizing the facts and evaluating the situation. We help our clients determine the appropriate remedial action to improve their policies and management controls, learn the lessons of its experience, and move ahead with stronger systems in place.
As the regulatory climate has intensified over the past few years, we responded by expanding our practice into Department of Labor investigations and audits. We will continue to sensitively guide our clients as the regulatory landscape changes with the country’s new President.
Additionally, we have successfully expanded into other practice areas directly related to our core competencies: vendor and service agreements, detailed cyber-security policies and education law for private schools. These areas allow us to assist our growing clients navigate areas where there is a need for sophisticated guidance.
As we welcome 2017, and the challenges of a new political climate, we are poised and energized by our original mission: to make workplace law accessible to our clients in a way that supports their business and organizational objectives. We take this opportunity to wish our colleagues, clients and friends the warmest of holidays, and a future of good health and success in their own distinctive workplaces.