With creative personnel in offices as diverse in location as Manhattan, London, and India, and with hundreds of media and other clients on either side of the Atlantic and in Asia as well, SmithDehn LLP is a national and international law firm that delivers top-tier service, while simultaneously meeting the needs and the budgets of companies and individuals, in ways that few large firms can. Our practice originated in 1996, after Russell Smith, a partner of Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein & Selz (now Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz), left that firm to move to the coastal town of East Hampton, New York and create a different kind of law firm. Several of our attorneys practiced under the name of Smith Dornan & Dehn PC ("SDD"), until 2008, when Russell and his SDD colleague Frank Dehn, along with SDD's Mike Cleaver, international media transactions specialist Alex Hannell in London, former Chicago Mercantile Exchange in-house counsel Patricia Holland, New York trial lawyer Kwarma Vanderpuye, and U.S. immigration law expert Priya Kumar joined to form the current new firm, SmithDehn LLP. With its origins near the Montauk lighthouse on the furthest reaches of New York's Long Island, our practice has progressed from an innovative experiment to a model for the legal industry, attracting some of the best clients, attorneys, and casework in the business.

Most notably, we are now among the counsel of choice for the film and television production industries, from Hollywood to New York, London, Dublin, and Mumbai. In particular, our members have been honored to represent nearly a dozen television series, several of the most significant motion pictures in recent years, as well as clients such as HBO, Sony Pictures, ITV, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Channel Four Television, Coquette Productions (the production company founded by Courteney Cox Arquette and David Arquette), Talkback Thames Productions, Lion Television, Tiger Aspect Productions, and over 100 other media companies. For a summary of our expertise and partial list of clients in this field, please click here. We also have been libel defense counsel for several newspapers, and counsel for many other clients in the television, motion picture, music, publishing, fashion, information technology, and other industries.

Although we are a general practice law firm, our areas of special expertise, in addition to television and film production counseling and libel defense, include copyright and trademark counseling and litigation, immigration processing for corporations and individuals in the entertainment and other fields, and plaintiffs' civil rights litigation.

Our clientele has rapidly expanded, not through marketing campaigns, but almost exclusively through "word-of-mouth" generated by our satisfied clients.

The growth of our practice confirms our belief that in reaction to mega-law-firms and mega-fees, there is a virtually unlimited market for top-tier, responsive legal assistance at more reasonable rates.  In our drive to dramatically increase quality, responsiveness, and efficiency, we are the only law firm that has established a high-end, legal processing subsidiary in India.  There, we can leverage the latest and best in communications and other information technology for our clients around the world.  With the inception of our Indian company, SDD Global Solutions, we are at the forefront of what promises to be a paradigm shift in the way that legal services will be provided in the twenty-first century.

What many traditional law firms still have not grasped, leading companies such as Microsoft, GE, Allstate, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, DuPont and American Express already have learned well.  These companies have moved in-house legal work to India, because they know that in India, the talent pool is outstanding, the cost of living is low, and the quality of service is high.  We have taken the concept of off-shoring legal work several steps further. 

First, we are pioneers in focusing not on low-end document processing or clerical work, but rather on higher-value services, such as legal research, legal drafting, intellectual property registrations, anti-counterfeiting operations, film and television production company management, immigration processing, tax planning and compliance, insurance claims administration, and a host of other functions.  Within a few years, we even will be handling mergers and acquisitions, with massive support from our Indian subsidiary.

Second, unlike virtually all other Western companies, which outsource work to third-party vendors or captive subsidiaries in Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai, we have established our subsidiary in what is now the ideal business location in India (Mysore, two hours from Bangalore), which stands apart from India's congested and increasingly inflation-ridden major cities, yet hosts some of the top universities that serve as incubators for thousands of extremely qualified job candidates in the legal and information technology fields. 

Third, in yet another innovation, and in keeping with the ethics of our practice, we are moving against the grain of "outsourcing" U.S. jobs.  Instead of laying off employees in the U.S., we have promoted them, improving their skills and leveraging their talents through the influx of top-notch legal support abroad.  Our clients benefit from the high morale of our U.S. employees and the unleashing of talent that we have facilitated on both continents.

On the subject of cost, the financial advantages that accrue to our clients can be readily seen not only in the well-known differences between salaries and costs of living among the workforces of the U.S. and India, but also in the price of office space, which is ultimately paid for by a law firm's clients.   Traditional law firms locate virtually all of their personnel in palatial offices in the highest priced real estate markets in the United States.  This outmoded custom has led to the point where most of each dollar that these firms charge their clients goes to pay for exorbitant rents.  Although we too have offices in Manhattan, most of our office space is located elsewhere, especially in India, where the employees of our subsidiary work in state-of-the-art facilities at 1/43 the cost of our comparable space in the two largest U.S. cities.  This is how we maintain our promise to our clients that they are paying for legal service, not real estate.

Our firm is also known for its innovations in billing methods.  Indeed, we were founded in part because of our antipathy to the usual law firm business structure that leads to unnecessary friction between attorneys and clients. The usual law firm billing method -- by the hour -- often does not serve the client's interest. The less efficiently the lawyers work, the more the client pays. Worse, each monthly bill can be a surprise or even a shock, after the client opens the envelope or email attachment to discover the mystery number of often unnecessary or inflated billable hours that have been tallied.  Soon the client begins to avoid phone calls with counsel, for fear of seeing multiple entries for "telephone consultations" on the next bill.

We prefer a different approach: fee for service.  We discuss with you the various steps that your matter may require, and tell you the cost for each step. You then can make your decisions with intelligence, without fear of surprise. And without extra charges just for talking with your attorneys along the way.

In another departure from the standard hourly billing system, for some of our regular clients we have arrived at an arrangement in which they pay a flat annual fee, which allows them unlimited consultations and legal research for the entire year.

In some carefully selected plaintiff's litigation matters, we may agree to handle a case on a contingent-fee basis.  This is a practice that many risk-averse law firms shun, but in many situations it is the only way for clients to achieve justice.  When their cases have merit, we are not afraid to take risks for clients in pursuing their rights.

On the subject of litigation, many law firms, especially very large ones, promise their litigation clients "lean staffing" of cases, to address well-founded fears of compounded hourly fees running amok.  Because we prefer not to bill by the hour, but rather for the service provided, we take the opposite approach.  Our aim in litigation, whether it is on behalf of a defendant or a plaintiff, is to obtain the desired result for our clients as quickly as possible, through the appropriate and unstinting application of concentrated legal pressure.  Often that means having multiple attorneys working on the same case every day until that result is achieved, if that is what is needed to get the job done.  We have found that in using this approach, we often run circles around the so-called "lean staffing" of mega-firms.   With our Indian subsidiary, we now can provide massive, high-quality, low-cost litigation support 24 hours a day.

If and when a case goes to trial, it is also important that your advocates be trial lawyers, not paper lawyers.  The harrows of a trial are often grueling for a client.   As the old saying goes, sometimes a bad settlement can be better than a good trial.  Sadly, however, trials often result because one side hardens its position, based on a perception that its adversary will avoid trial.  This may be because the adversary's lawyers are either prohibitively expensive, or have a reputation for being paper litigators, rather than experienced trial attorneys.  Having handled multiple, high-profile trials in various courts, we are known by our adversaries to be willing to go the distance for our clients. This lessens the chances that an opportunity for an appropriate settlement will be missed.

Lastly, another feature that sets us apart is the background and passion of our attorneys.  Unlike most lawyers who follow the well beaten track from college to law school, then straight into private practice, each of our attorneys has had valuable career experiences and training far beyond these minimum requirements.  From television and film production, to human rights activism, to union organizing, to hard-hitting journalism, our attorneys' career histories reflect not only skill, but also a passion for life and work outside of the traditional lawyer's mindset. 

To cite just one example, when the tragic debacle in Iraq was being hatched in The White House, several of our attorneys organized Attorneys Against the War, an active association of hundreds of lawyers from major firms across the United States and Britain. The organization was headquartered at our offices, and it added an extra dimension to the peace movement. More importantly for our clients, regardless of political outlook, the passion and enthusiasm of our attorneys are reflected in their practice of law, and their dedication to quality service.