A department, not a phone number.

Philosophy

Legal problems are cheapest before they exist. The contract clause that would have prevented the dispute costs a fraction of the dispute. The corporate record that would have survived diligence costs a fraction of the broken deal. Prevention is not glamorous work, which is why almost nobody sells it.

The billable hour is the reason. Under the hour, prevention is unbilled and crisis is lucrative, so the industry organizes itself around crisis. This is not a criticism of the lawyers who work that way; it is a description of the incentive they work under. Retained charges a flat fee precisely so that the firm profits most when the client has the fewest problems.

What a growing company needs is not a lawyer to call. It is a legal department: a function inside the business, working on a calendar, accountable for the whole legal surface, present before anything goes wrong. Retained exists to be that department for companies not yet ready to build their own.

The Founder

Retained was founded by an Arizona attorney with more than thirteen years of practice spanning complex bankruptcy litigation and commercial transactions, including service as counsel to Chapter 11 trustees. The founder also operates multiple businesses, and built Retained around a simple observation from both sides of the table: the companies that avoid catastrophe are the ones whose lawyers knew the business before the trouble started.

Where Retained Practices

Retained is an Arizona practice. Multi-state support is coordinated where needed.