From Black Ties To Blue Collars, A Lawyer Finds A New Life
Meet Eric Farber. For over twenty years, Eric represented some of the biggest names in the world of sports, entertainment, and entrepreneurship. During his time as one of the sports and entertainment industries’ most sought after litigators and advisors, he represented Amaru Entertainment (the Tupac Shakur Estate), dozens of NFL and NBA clients, Olympic Gold Medalists, Hollywood writers and directors, and even a few casino owners. For all that time, his life was on the road, in airplanes, hotels, conference rooms, and courtrooms all over the country, and often in other countries as well.
But as glamorous as all that sounds, he was also the attorney who spent a New Years’ Eve with his then-fiancée, now wife, at a table at a five-star restaurant in San Luis Obispo reading a sixty-page legal document on his cell phone (on the orders of a federal judge, the document was due at midnight), and then got up at 4:00 a.m. to catch a flight to Atlanta to spend the next three days in depositions and in the negotiation room, in order to turn around a case he had been brought into just days before.
Lawyering, even at the highest levels, isn’t quite as sexy as it sounds.
And maybe it doesn’t sound all that sexy to begin with.
One day, Farber says, the proverbial light bulb went on over his head. He had been working seventy- and eighty-hour weeks on behalf of his illustrious clients for years, and making quite a comfortable living doing so . . . but it was taking a toll on him, and he was exhausted. During a tense negotiation for an NFL player in Buffalo, New York, he stood up from the table and ruptured a disc in his back. He ended up in emergency surgery and in a rehab center in Buffalo, in the dead of winter, for close to three weeks. Recalling that time now, he says, “What amazed me most was that some of my clients actually fired me during that time because my cell phone didn’t work well in the rehab facility!”
Even worse, his workload was having a deeply negative effect on his relationship and personal life. There was also a question of mission and meaning. He had done right by his clients, always making himself available to make sure they were protected . . . but was that enough of a contribution to society?
To the surprise of his clients and his peers in the legal community, Farber shut down his high-flying practice to go into workers compensation law. He founded a new firm, Pacific Workers’ Compensation Law Center, to do one thing and one thing only — handle workers’ comp cases for the workers in his community.
When you think about workers’ comp attorneys, the image that often comes to mind is a cross between a boiler room and a factory line: Cases are handled impersonally. Messages can go unreturned for months. Service is terrible, no one cares, and no one seems to be in charge.
If there were ever a corner of the legal industry ready for a shakeup and a totally new approach, it was workers’ comp.
In 2011, Farber took his experience as a high-flying litigator and started doing workers’ comp for formers athletes — many of them his former clients. He liked it so much that in 2014 he jumped in with both feet and started Pacific Workers’ Compensation Law Center. He began representing the real people of the community — first responders, construction workers, teachers, healthcare workers, drivers, etc. — who keep the city moving every day.
Today, Pacific Workers’ represents thousands of workers in northern California. It’s a firm driven by a never-ending commitment to its clients. “When we started doing comp, I could just see how badly these firms treated their clients and their teams,” Farber says. “This wasn’t what my partner and I wanted. We wanted a place that truly served our clients, and also to create a great place to work.”
“I can’t say that happier clients meet better results,” Farber says, “but one of the reasons they’re happy is that when they call or e-mail us, we respond immediately, and then we get them the best results we can, as quickly as possible. So maybe there is a connection.”
Farber found his partner, a young, savvy attorney named Bilal Kassem, while working his way up the ranks in a comp defense firm. Unusual for the industry, the partners began focusing on the company culture, taking a page from the well-funded tech companies on the other side of the Bay in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Culture now drives this place.” Farber says. “We focus on the growth of our team, motivating them every day to be better people and better employees.” In addition to trying to provide every benefit they can, they also have employee-run initiatives like a mentor program, a wellness program, and even a book club. “It’s funny; I’m not sure we ever intended to grow so big. It was actually driven by our desire to give more. The margins in comp are so low, so we had to become high volume to be able to take care of everyone the way we wanted to.
“It’s all about personal development and professional growth,” Farber says. “As we say to our employees, whatever seat you occupy right now is temporary. The speed at which you move to the next seat is up to you. Our firm is a place where people feel safe to make mistakes, learn from them, and grow.” All this focus on the client, the team, and culture has caused the firm to grow faster than they ever imagined. They have been listed on the Inc. 5000 and the Bay Area Fast 100 (a list of fastest-growing companies in the Bay Area), and twice named to the Law Firm 500 list of fastest growing law firms in America. Just days ago, they were nominated as one of Inc. magazine’s Best Workplaces in America.
The company has grown from four people to over forty in just a few years. Farber’s personal mission now is being active in the community. His firm is one of the biggest supporters of the Oakland Firefighter’s Union, and has given scholarships to needy individuals. “The incredible success of Pacific Workers’ has allowed me to focus on something I never got to before — being part of my community. I was always somewhere else. After more than twenty years on the road, I now feel like I actually live in the Bay Area.”
The firm also supports BAY EMT, which takes severely underprivileged individuals from the community and puts them through EMT and firefighter basic training so that they can have careers in those fields. Pacific Workers’ gives scholarships to the highest-ranking cadet in BAY EMT, in order to help pay for equipment they need to buy.
“I’ve worked at a talent agency, in the film industry, in casting — all kinds of things in addition to law,” Farber says. “And of all the things I’ve done, this is easily the most rewarding. We’re serving and helping an enormous number of people. And we’re taking this team of people from our local community and turning them into amazing professionals.”
Does Farber miss the NFL stuff and the Shakur estate? A little bit. But compared with what he’s got now, he couldn’t be happier.
