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Firm Overview
Overview
Farella Braun + Martel is a leading Northern California law firm representing corporate and private clients in sophisticated business transactions and complex commercial, civil, and criminal litigation. Clients seek the firm’s imaginative legal solutions and the dynamism and intellectual creativity of our lawyers. The firms practices areas also include employment law, energy and infrastructure, environmental law, private client, real estate, technology, white collar criminal defense, and of course, the wine industry. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains an office in the Napa Valley that is focused on the wine industry.
Client Centric Approach to Business
Farella connects on a personal level with all of its clients, big and small. It has successfully fused the quality, experience and resources of large firms with the relationship, flexibility, and personal attention associated with a mid-sized firm. Our low leverage and low attrition means clients build deep relationships with a stable team of lawyers with whom they work as long-term partners, helping them to pursue and realize their strategic business goals.
Within the industries that they focus, their attorneys work cohesively in interdisciplinary teams to advance each client’s objectives in the most effective, coordinated and efficient manner.
It Was a Good Idea Then: It’s Still a Good Idea (Thomas Elke)
The firm was founded in 1962 by Frank Farella, Jerome Braun, and Thomas Elke. Their initial clients included American Push Broom, Jumbo Orange Drive-In, Home Insurance Company, Transamerica, and Tyger Oil. Two years later, John Martel joined the firm, where his first desk was an orange crate in a small room at 333 Pine St. in San Francisco. In 1970, the firm moved to the Russ Building in San Francisco, the “Wall Street of the West,” and in 2023 relocated one block away to One Bush Street. The Wine Country office was opened in St. Helena in 1995 to serve the firm’s substantial wine, agribusiness, and private clients.
Commitment to Diversity, Equality, Inclusion + Belonging
The firm strives to ensure that everyone working at Farella feels like they belong. To that end, the firm’s recruiting, retention and practice development programs welcome, support and promote the interests of women, families, and people of all ethnicities and sexual orientations. At Farella, they are committed to diversity, both as an ethical ideal and as a business imperative.
Recognition
Farella has received industry and peer recognition equal to any firm in the country. Their attorneys include fellows of the American College of Trial Lawyers, American College of Appellate Lawyers, American College of Environmental Lawyers, American College of Coverage Counsel, College of Labor & Employment Lawyers, and American College of Investment Counsel. Farella has been named among Law360’s California Powerhouses, featured on the National Law Journal’s Midsize Hot List and is named one of the Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times / Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Green Business
In 2006, Farella was the first major law firm in San Francisco to obtain certification as a green business by the San Francisco Green Business Program, recognizing the firm for meeting the program’s stringent environmental standards. They received their fourth Green Business certification in 2020.