LAW FIRM OF
THEIR GAME”
I’ve never walked down a linoleum supermarket aisle only to slip and fall on a bleeding jar of tomato sauce. I usually notice the bright yellow tape that screams CAUTION around a deep concrete hole in the ground. Drunk drivers keep their distance from me. This would make me lucky, maybe somewhat blessed. But today as I was parking into a tight space in a Gelson’s parking lot, I thought I’d broken the seal. The black Hummer parked next to me had forty inch wheels that spilled over the faded white line separating our vehicles. Fine, Hummers tend to do that, but this Hummer had a ravenous German Shepherd snarling at me through a crack from the window in the back seat. For a second, I thought it was over. Done. The second after that, I felt fine knowing that if that dog broke through the tinted glass and ripped into me, there were three personal injury attorneys in Beverly Hills who would help restore justice to my possible predicament.
Inside the Law offices of Banafsheh, Danesh and Javid, P.C. hangs a black and white picture of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra: a portrait of three men with exceptional talents. These charming men will be best remembered as a tight group of endearing entertainers, but most people are unfamiliar with one of the Rat Pack’s most important roles, the one that helped abolish segregation in Las Vegas hotels and casinos. In the early 1960s, the boys would not play or endorse any establishment that did not give full service to African American entertainers. They fought for those who had been wronged.
Seated before me are three sophisticated young men who exude just the right amount of confidence that you’d expect from successful attorneys. They are all smiles. It’s warm in here, but the temperature is mild. I immediately get a sense that they’ve known each other a long time. I’m right, they’ve been friends since high school. Raphael and Kevin even studied law together at UCLA. But after talking to them for a few minutes I can also see that regardless of how tight a family may be, its members still remain very different. When I asked each of them to describe their strengths, they all spoke diamonds about their partners. Raphael, the litigator put it best when he said, “Obviously, I’m biased. It’s my company and my partners, but I’ve seen a lot of people my age and older than me that are partners, and you’ll never see a fit such as the one between me and my partners. It’s like the way a jigsaw puzzle fits, in the sense that Kevin is very much the foundation of the office. There is nothing that me or Sean could ever do - even if we were here twelve hours a day – that could make the office run even a fraction of the way that Kevin can. Sean is very much the face of the office. Sean is what I would call a “rainmaker,” in the sense that he just generates attention. He generates income, he generates clients, he generates business. He’s just one of those guys. He has one of those personalities where he steps into a room, and by the end of the night it’s all high-fives.”
Yes, Sean is very much the kind of person you want to be around. He is soft-spoken and has an aura that simply puts you at ease. I imagine him handing over tissues one by one as I sit across from him at his mahogany desk, crying to him about the dog in the car. Sean understands me. He is relatable. He even quotes the Notorious B.I.G. when I ask him why he chose to be an attorney. “You know that one Biggie Smalls song where he says – ‘You’re either slangin’ rock or you got a wicked jump shot.’ - in our community, either you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer, and the doctor route was not for us. So we went the law route.”
Kevin strikes me as a bulldog, a handsome bulldog who’s on a short chain, restrained and ready to attack, if and only when someone he cares about has been harmed. For an attorney, that’s an excellent quality to have. “Competitively, I want to take our firm to a very exceptional level. We’ve started very modestly, each sharing about 600 square feet of space to handling cases where we’re settling our clients an excess of a million dollars. I want us to be at the top of our game and be the most equipped firm to help our clients. I don’t want there ever to be any case that we can’t handle. I want to know that we could do a better job than anyone else out there. I truly believe that, and I know we’re getting there.”
It’s something that they are obviously very passionate about. Kevin, Sean, and Raphael are known for maintaining very close relationships with their clients. They make themselves available to them, not just by appointment, they also give out their cell phone numbers to their clients when needed. I can hear the sincerity in Raphael’s voice when he says, “I had a case where the client came to our office with an offer of ten thousand dollars for their case. A year down the line I got him four hundred thousand dollars. Every now and then you get those clients that have really been wronged in life. When you have those clients that really appreciate what you do, and you get a great result for them, THAT probably is the most gratifying feeling in the world. There is no other area of law that can provide that.”
310.887.1818 BD&J Personal Injury Lawyers in Los Angeles