On January 1, 1993, THIRTY YEARS AGO, after much thought and consideration, I opened the doors to our law practice in Santa Monica, California.
As any small businessman, opening a business was full of fear and trepidation. Like today, 1992-93 was an economic recession. Fortunately, the clients that had previously worked with me came to my new firm. By providing great quality service at reasonable costs and developing strategies to meet their specific legal/business goals, clients have been very happy at our firm. Many of those original clients are still clients of Sherman IP® today.
Sherman IP® has been blessed with great clients, great vendors and most of all, great teammates. Our longest tenured, current teammate has been with us almost 18 years. It has been a great ride so far, sometimes fraught with “headaches” like the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the pandemic. We’ve had offices in Santa Monica, Century City, Newport Beach, San Jose and now Encino, California and St. Petersburg, Florida. We’ve been larger and we’ve been smaller. At different times we’ve partnered with firms across the United States and around the world to help our clients meet their legal and intellectual property needs. Most of all, we’ve created what we think of as the Sherman IP Family.
For the first two decades of our practice, we worked mainly with large-scale clients (many of whom are on the Fortune 500 listings) who came to us through our reputation of being able to handle the most complex matters using the simplest and most cost-effective strategies possible. We developed internal systems to coordinate across many related matters and our clients took note of that novel approach.
In the last decade we have opened our firm to individual clients and expanded our proprietary systems to meet those individual clients’ needs in a cost-effective, high quality, large volume manner. We felt that by marketing our services to folks who could not normally hire sophisticated attorneys, we could give back to the community that has given us so much. We developed our patented AKeyMark® Platform and our Control Legal® legal practice to provide simple, pay-as-you-go services to clients who need to easily understand the cost and value of each step of the process. That way, those clients can best budget their limited financial resources and determine if they want to proceed further with each step of a legal matter. We noticed our efforts were a success and many folks really appreciated what we were doing for them. Thousands of clients came to Sherman IP through these efforts, and we were able to help them protect their intellectual property, i.e., to “Be the One and Only®.”
I want to thank everyone who has supported our efforts, whether clients, vendors, contractors, or anyone else. I really want to thank my Sherman IP teammates, both past and present, for having gotten us here. It has been my honor to have worked next to you, to get to know you, and to see all of us grow personally and professionally.
Most of all, I want to thank our clients for appreciating us and trusting us with your legal needs. I have always thought of and treated everyone like the Sherman IP Family that you are! Thank you for a great 30 years…the best is yet to come!
In celebration of our 30th Year, for every client payment exceeding $1,000.00 for 2023 legal services, we will issue a $30.00 non-negotiable, non-transferable credit against future work completed in 2023.
Thank You from the bottom of my heart!
Ken Sherman