How to Build and Offer the Strongest Team
Strong teams don't just happen. They don't just coalesce out of nowhere, with no purpose or planning. Strong teams are, instead, usually the result of the dream and vision of the founder, owner, chief executive, coach, or manager. Strong teams are also usually the result of the values and commitments of that team visionary, creator, and leader. Strong teams don't just arise out of a pure vision. They also take passion, persistence, and great effort, borne out of the founder's single-minded purpose. And strong teams that provide expert professional services don't arise without the founder and leader having a mind for service and heart for people. As the following story shows, the Lento Law Firm team arose out of exactly these qualities, commitments, and purposes.
A Star Attorney
National academic administrative attorney Joseph D. Lento, the founder and namesake of the Lento Law Firm is an extraordinarily skilled, experienced, committed, and effective advocate. College and university students and others in academia needing academic or misconduct discipline defense need an attorney with abundant academic administrative knowledge, skills, and experience. A local attorney in general practice, or even a criminal defense attorney or other litigation attorney, generally doesn't have that critical academic administrative knowledge, skills, and experience. If you face an academic administrative proceeding in which your education is at risk, then you can do no better than to retain national academic administrative attorney Joseph Lento.
Leading a Star Team
But strong teams, not only strong individuals, win victories. And star teams, not only star solo attorneys, win academic administrative cases. For your best representation and experience, you deserve a premier law firm team, not just a premier academic administrative attorney. A strong, national law firm team has at least four key dimensions: (1) expert legal staff; (2) experienced and committed staff investigators; (3) key nationwide strategic partners; and (4) abundant expert consultants and resources. Founding attorney Joseph D. Lento has thus assembled the strongest possible Lento Law Firm team. The Lento Law Firm team has the best legal staff, investigators, strategic partners, and expert consultants, covering all four critical dimensions. When you retain national academic administrative attorney Joseph D. Lento, you also retain the expert Lento Law Firm Team.
Bringing the Right Resources
Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm haven't set out to build something big. Attorney Lento has instead strategized in forming the Lento Law Firm team to build something effective. Anyone can build something big. It takes special insight to build something practical, useful, and effective. Students needing academic administrative representation or discipline defense don't benefit from big. Big works well for retailers, ships, and football stadiums. Big doesn't work so well for individual student representation in academic administrative cases. Students needing academic representation or discipline defense benefit not from big but from effective. Attorney Lento thus ensures that every addition to the Lento Law Firm team makes its representation stronger, its services timelier and more effective, and its commitment to client success stronger.
The Satisfaction of Serving
A strong team doesn't arise and persist unless each of its members catches the vision of the team's founder and share in the founder's satisfaction of a valuable job well done. Law firms of all qualities and types survive only with sufficient economic return to keep the doors open. But premier law firms persist and thrive when their team members draw satisfaction from the flourishing of their clients that the firm's services engender. Attorney Lento rises each morning with a passion to make his student clients' lives better through his Lento Law Firm's services. When attorney Lento helps another student win the student's case, claim, or defense, attorney Lento draws great satisfaction from the student's joy, relief, peace, and prosperity. Every Lento Law Firm team member shares in that satisfaction. Attorney Lento does not employ team members who don't share his service vision. Economic rewards come and go. Service rewards, found in the flourishing of the Firm's clients, are eternal. When you retain Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm, you put the most committed academic administrative and student discipline defense team in your corner.
Legal Staff
Law firms traditionally employ associate attorneys, paralegals or legal assistants, and secretarial or administrative staff to back up, prepare, and support the firm's star partner attorneys. Founding Lento Law Firm attorney Joseph D. Lento has gone to great lengths to build the best legal staff so that his Lento Law Firm team can serve your needs in academic administrative matters. You win when you retain a premier team with a strong legal staff. That's what Attorney Lento has done with the Lento Law Firm team: built a strong, sensitive, skilled, experienced, and up-to-date legal staff.
Associate Attorneys
Associate attorneys ordinarily do the background research, drafting, organization, preparation, and support that legal and administrative cases require from trained and licensed attorneys but that don't demand the partner attorney's prominent reputation and premier skills. Associate attorneys are fully capable of representing clients alone in administrative proceedings and court. They have the license and skills of other attorneys. But they choose to employ and develop their skills supporting partner and mentor attorneys. With his substantial academic administrative experience, his high reputation, and his law school contacts, Attorney Lento has a special eye for recruiting talented associate attorneys. Attorney Lento also has a special skill for developing associate attorney talent.
Law Clerks and Interns
A law clerk or intern is usually a student in law school or even a law school graduate who has not yet received a license to practice law. Law firms employ law clerks and interns both for the benefit of the firm and its clients and for the development of the law clerk or intern into a fine attorney. Attorney Lento, like other premier attorneys, benefited in law school and immediately after from public and private clerkships and internships that served his employers well but also served his own development into a premier academic administrative attorney. Law clerks are not necessarily neophytes, wet behind the ears. Ace law clerks can bring intellectual curiosity, energy, scope, and depth to a law firm that it might otherwise not possess. Attorney Lento uses his academic contacts to recruit to the Lento Law Firm the best law clerks and interns from highly respected law schools.
Paralegals and Legal Assistants
Paralegals or legal assistants generally graduate from formal paralegal programs, holding four-year degrees and paralegal or legal assistant certifications. Paralegals or legal assistants don't just run errands or do filing. Instead, they traditionally do the background work of opening, organizing, researching, summarizing, preparing, and maintaining client case files. A premier academic administrative attorney like attorney Lento goes to hearings, conferences, and meetings with the need for documents, research, and information organized and at his fingertips. The Lento Law Firm's paralegals or legal assistants have just the right skills and experience in academic administrative cases to keep files in order and put accurate information at Attorney Lento's fingertips. Their discernment, judgment, opinions, and skills enhance the skills that the Lento Law Firm's associate attorneys and other team members contribute to each client's matter.
Just the Right Mix
A strong support staff, though, requires both seasoned veterans and talented new blood. Veteran support staff brings the experience and perspective to keep clients' cases on track. Experience teaches the unwritten customs, conventions, practices, protocols, forms, and styles that academic administrative matters. But new talent, skills, and perspectives are equally important for a strong team. New legal staff bring new skills with technology, research, communication, and task management, and new knowledge of laws and rules. Attorney Lento thus ensures that the Lento Law Firm team has just the right mix of experienced legal staff and sharp new legal staff from highly respected law schools. Attorney Lento and his management team are always on the lookout for additional talented legal staff, even as the Lento Law Firm continues to develop and reward the knowledge, skills, and commitment of its expert legal staff.
Staff Investigators
In-House Investigators
Attorneys may use outside private investigators, who are often retired law enforcement officers working on a contract basis. Law enforcement officers have training and experience in investigating criminal and criminal-like matters. They know the ins and outs of gaining information by legal but confidential and secure means. Attorneys can hire outside private investigators by the case or task, although only some attorneys do. Many attorneys just don't hire investigators, instead doing the best that they can on their own. Few law firms, though, bring private investigators into the law firm as employed legal staff, like the Lento Law Firm has. Attorney Lento determined early in his academic administrative practice that student discipline defense cases often require investigators with special academic knowledge and skill. Investigation wins student cases, which is why Attorney Lento adds staff investigators to the Lento Law Firm team.
Nationwide Investigators
The Lento Law Firm also maintains a network of investigators at locations nationwide. Attorney Lento has successfully represented hundreds of college and university students from coast to coast at locations across the nation. Those students' matters often benefit from local investigation. The Lento Law Firm's investigator network gives it access to highly-skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable investigators who know the local customs and conventions and have local investigatory contacts and resources. When you retain Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm team, you gain access to the strongest of investigatory networks.
Investigation Experience
The Lento Law Firm team includes investigators with extraordinary skill and experience. The Lento Law Firm team has included staff investigators with decades of experience on the nation's largest and most-sophisticated police forces and experience in Special Investigation Units. The Lento Law Firm team also includes staff investigators who have conducted thousands of private investigations into alleged student disciplinary violations, Title IX and sexual assault allegations, and other student misconduct allegations. That academic investigatory experience has proven invaluable in case after case, to client after client. Students usually don't, for instance, often get off on credible but false or exaggerated Title IX sexual assault allegations. But Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm team have built a strong record of success in exactly those areas on the back of skilled investigations. The Lento Law Firm's investigators also have substantial experience investigating criminal and civil matters in the state and federal courts.
What Investigators Do
The work of private and staff investigators is always confidential. Investigators do work and discover information that clients, firms, and opposing parties generally do not want disclosed. That information may be medical. It may be financial or transactional, and sometimes criminal. The information may be private text, email, or social media. The information may also be relational, intimate, and sexual, whether audio, video, photographic, or textual. Investigator discoveries are always confidential. But they are also often highly relevant and influential in determining the outcome of student discipline or academic matters. Credible and reliable investigators use only legal means to acquire their confidential information. Those means may be interviews, statements, web searches, archive searches, scene visits, forensic examinations, and confidential consultations. But whatever legal means investigators use, they also use effective means, given their ordinarily substantial law enforcement training and experience. The Lento Law Firm's staff investigators and network investigators know how to make the difference in client cases.
Strategic Partners
The Value of Strategic Partners
Few law firms and attorneys think deeply about joining forces with strategic partners to better serve their clients. Law firms and attorneys tend to think that they can do everything better on their own. But college and university students fighting academic administrative disputes and facing expulsion can benefit from all the help that they can get. And sometimes, the right strategic partner can make just the difference that an imperiled student needs. Attorney Lento recognizes the value to the Lento Law Firm's student clients of having strategic partner services available in special cases. Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm team are confident in their own expertise and skills. The Lento Law Firm team often wins clients' cases without substantial strategic partner participation. But some cases call for rare and special strategic expertise. The Lento Law Firm team makes those strategic partners available to its clients in those special cases. When you retain the Lento Law Firm team, you gain access to the Firm's strategic partner network.
A Prime Example
Strategic expertise can come in several forms, to aid in student discipline defense and academic administrative matters. But a prime example is the Lento Law Firm's strategic partnership with an attorney intelligence analyst and intelligence firm. That strategic partnership brings to the Lento Law Firm's client's decades of experience in the intelligence field. Intelligence analysts synthesize, organize, and discern critical patterns within vast amounts of unstructured information. Academic administrative matters can swamp a student and the student's attorney representative with huge quantities of disorganized information. Intelligence analyst services organize and digest that information to reveal, pinpoint, and document difference-making facts. These strategic partnership intelligence services have contributed to many of the Lento Law Firm's biggest and boldest wins for student clients across decades of representation.
Investigative Disciplines
Many attorneys and other professionals simply don't understand the depth, breadth, sophistication, and value of investigative disciplines. That's another dimension that makes the Lento Law Firm different. Attorney Lento formed the Firm's strategic partnership with the attorney intelligence analyst and intelligence firm because he understands the value of that rich, discerning, and practical discipline. The Lento Law Firm's intelligence analyst strategic partner has certifications in multiple investigative disciplines.
Expert Consultants and Other Outside Resources
The Difference Between Inside and Outside Resources
Legal staff, investigative services, and strategic partnerships for intelligence services are all inside resources. Those first three dimensions of the Lento Law Firm's expert team, each described above, help the Firm do what it needs to do with the greatest skill, sophistication, efficiency, efficacy, and practical effectiveness. School officials with whom Attorney Lento deals when representing students may not even know the extent to which Attorney Lento employs and relies on those inside resources. Who cares, other than Attorney Lento, who must be fully prepared to represent each student in each individual case? Yet student academic representation and discipline defense also routinely requires outside resources that help publicly confirm, establish, and prove the student's case or defense. Attorney Lento's and the Lento Law Firm's work isn't all behind the scenes. Much of the work must appear evident to the school officials who will decide or resolve each student's case. The Lento Law Firm assiduously develops those outside resources to prove each student's claim, defense, or case.
Educational Consultants
Educational consultants are a first key outside resource that can assist many student cases. Academia has its own culture, distinct from business culture, professional culture, or the judicial culture of traditional dispute resolution. Academic culture has its own norms, expectations, and terminology. Academic culture also has its own way of resolving disputes, around certain values of the academy, certain options, and certain promises and representations. Because academics know how to speak to academics, Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm have recruited a network of educational consultants to work creatively on student cases. That network includes former college and university deans, provosts, directors, and administrators, and school superintendents, principals, and counselors, among others. Not only do these educational consultants know how to discern and advocate for productive solutions that preserve the student's educational opportunities, but they also have the resumes, reputations, and relationships with school officials to assist Attorney Lento in achieving the best possible outcomes for his clients. When you retain the Lento Law Firm in a case that would benefit from an educational consultant, you put that educational network to work for you. A skilled national academic attorney is a great asset. A skilled national academic attorney with a network of supportive educational consultants is an even greater asset.
Medical Consultants
Expert witness resources are another key outside resource on which many student cases depend. Identifying the kind of expert witness a case needs and then locating a qualified and willing expert in that field is one of the most critical tasks an academic administrative attorney must perform well in order to consistently win. For example, students whose academic performance a sudden and unexpected physical or mental disability has unfortunately impaired, resulting in academic deficiencies, often need an expert medical witness to examine the student, diagnose the condition, and report, attest, or even testify on the student's behalf. Depending on the impairing condition, the medical expert might be an internist, orthopedist, neurologist, psychiatrist, therapist, or learning-disability specialist, among many other potential specialists. Attorney Lento has the professional network to add those specialists to the Lento Law Firm team.
Forensic Consultants
Many student academic or discipline cases, though, don't involve medical issues. They instead involve forensic issues. Take, for example, a case involving false allegations that the student defendant cheated in an online exam. A computer forensics expert may be a critical expert witness to examine and testify to the electronic evidence that exonerates the accused student. In academic disputes, experts in electronically stored information can be difference-making witnesses. Other academic and discipline cases require signature experts, handwriting experts, ink experts, paper experts, copying experts, copyright experts, and experts in other communications, technology, legal, accounting, and administrative fields. Student cases can even require ballistics experts, fingerprint experts, blood-testing experts, DNA experts, and other experts frequently employed in criminal cases. Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm have frequently added forensics experts to the Lento Law Firm team.
Remedial and Rehabilitative Consultants
Student academic and discipline cases can also frequently involve the defense team's need to show how the defendant student can remediate deficient skills or rehabilitate deficient character. Title IX cases involving sexual assault or harassment are an example where a defendant student responsible for some manner of harm may benefit from the examination, diagnosis, and testimony of a clinically certified sex offender therapist.
Presentation Specialists
Student academic and discipline cases that go to formal hearings can require other consultants and resources for a winning effort. Hearings can benefit from the skills of medical artists or other illustrators, photographers, videographers or animators, model builders, and other presentation experts. Many hearing exhibits involve the simple reproduction of electronically stored information or print documents. But hearings can, in special cases, involve what lawyers and judges call demonstrative exhibits that an academic administrative attorney would create to show or illustrate a condition, circumstance, scene, or event. Attorney Lento has the network to add presentation specialists to the Lento Law Firm team for those special cases.
The Value of an Expert Law Firm Team
Economic Value
An expert law firm team can provide substantially more economic value to student clients than a solo attorney can provide. The time and attention of a full-fledged, licensed, high-reputation, high-skill attorney carries a high cost. You get that for which you pay. But some casework on student discipline defense and student academic disputes does not require the services of a high-skill, high-cost attorney. A skilled and experienced academic administrative attorney with a well-developed network and strong in-house team can assign lower-skill but still-critical tasks to legal staff, staff investigators, strategic partners, and consultants. The high quality of that assigned work remains important. Top-flight lawyers need top-flight support to maintain the premier level of their work. But delegating lower-level tasks to highly qualified, lower-cost personnel reduces the case costs. It also thereby increases the value of the law firm's services. Attorney Lento follows that economic principle to ensure that all clients of the Lento Law Firm benefit from the strength of his team, not only in skill but also in economic value.
Reputational Value
An expert law firm team can also provide substantially more reputational value to student clients than a solo attorney can provide. Effective student client representation often involves a cast of high-reputation characters, not just a single high-reputation attorney. The academic attorney's reputation, character, and gravitas are important and influential. But the reputation, personality, demeanor, impact, and influence of expert witnesses, consultants, investigators, and other law firm team members are also important and influential in many cases. By assembling a strong Lento Law Firm team, Attorney Lento can provide student clients with greater reputational value than a solo attorney without a premier team provides.
Academic Administrative Skill
An expert law firm team can also provide substantially more academic administrative skill for student client benefit than a solo attorney can provide without such a team. Attorney Lento has the skills and experience you need for premier attorney representation in academic administrative matters. But your case may well need or benefit from additional skills and experience from expert witnesses, consultants, analysts, and investigators, not to mention legal staff. One person, like Attorney Lento, can be quite skilled, discerning, influential, and wise. But a strong and cohesive team of professionals, like the Lento Law Firm team, can increase the skill base, broaden and deepen the insight and judgment, and make a greater impact in many student cases. When you retain Attorney Lento, you retain a highly-skilled Lento Law Firm team.
National Academic Administrative Defense Team Available
If you are a college or university student facing academic probation or dismissal, a Title IX or other misconduct proceeding, or similar dispute with your school that puts your education at risk, then retain national academic administrative attorney Joseph D. Lento and the expert Lento Law Firm team. When facing a school-related issue or concern, Attorney Lento and his team can help you whoever you are and wherever you may be. Your college or university does not matter, whether East Coast, West Coast, North, South, Midwest, or any location in between. Your degree program or major does not matter. Your undergraduate, graduate, or professional level does not matter. And how far you've progressed in your program or even in your academic administrative proceeding does not matter. Attorney Lento and the Lento Law Firm are available for your expert representation. Founding attorney Joseph D. Lento has assembled a premier team of legal staff, staff investigators, strategic nationwide attorney partners, and expert consultants to win your case. Call 888.535.3686 go online to tell Attorney Lento about your case.
