The Herzog Law Firm has been ahead of the curve for the last three decades.
When its corporate clients began drying up in the late 1980s, the Albany-based firm shifted its focus to elder law and estate planning. As firm president Harry Miller described it, “We kind of reinvented ourselves.”
“The population is rapidly aging,” said Miller. “It’s forecast that over the next 25 to 30 years, the number of people over the age of 65 is going to double.”
By focusing on estate planning and elder law for as long as it has, Herzog Law Firm can offer clients expertise other firms cannot.
“One of the advantages of having a firm like ours … is because we do so much of it, there are very few situations we find in families that we haven’t experienced at one time or another in the past,” said Miller, who has been with the firm since 1974. “Most estate plans go very smoothly and naturally along the way and are fairly routine, but then you get into situations where families have friction with each other. Those are situations you have to deal with.”
Estate planning is especially critical as people get older and they have to think about their families’ future, and Miller said it’s not always something that people do.
“Estate planning is kind of something people procrastinate about,” he said. “Often, the estate planning impetus kicks in at a point where they have an illness or something, and they realize they haven’t done something. That’s the worst time to do estate planning.”
But as more people reach the age where estate planning becomes vital, they are turning to firms such as Herzog to help them with that.
“Our practice is growing,” said Miller. “For instance, our business for the first six months of 2015 is ahead of the first six months of 2014. We’re probably up about 10 or 15 percent, I would say.”
But even with estate planning growing, Miller said the firm — which currently has eight lawyers — isn’t going to grow to the size it was back in the 1980s, when it employed 32 lawyers.
“I don’t see us growing into a really big firm,” said Miller. “We’ll probably add a couple of lawyers and maybe another paralegal.”
Being a smaller firm seems to suit the people who work for Herzog, anyway, said Miller.
“The firm has gone through a lot of different changes (since being founded in 1946 by Jacob Herzog),” said Miller. “We merged with a couple of firms over the years, and then we went through a couple of corporate divorces. But the core group of people that we all started with stayed here.”
And that level of experience translates into a successful law firm will continue to offer its expertise in the areas of estate planning and elder law.
Herzog Law Firm is located at 7 Southwoods Boulevard in Corporate Woods. For more information about the services they offer, visit www.herzoglaw.com.
