Who We Are
Bredhoff & Kaiser is a firm of 30 lawyers with a national practice in a broad range of matters affecting the rights and interests of labor unions, workers, nonprofit organizations, employee benefit plans, and individuals. Founded seven decades ago by a small group of luminaries of the labor and appellate bars, including one lawyer who would later become a Supreme Court justice, the firm has a rich past, detailed in the Bredhoff History section.
The firm has since expanded, not only in its number of lawyers, but in the breadth of clients that it represents and in the subject areas in which it has gained experience and expertise.
OUR PRACTICE
Bredhoff today has a flourishing litigation practice at the trial-court level, which now accounts for the majority of our work and often dovetails with our longstanding and vibrant Supreme Court and appellate practice. The skill of our attorneys and support staff, our wealth of experience in handling difficult cases, and our unswerving commitment to our clients all combine to allow us to go toe-to-toe—and win—against some of the largest firms in the country.
We also have one of the nation’s leading employee benefits practices, which is part of our larger counseling practice. Attorneys in our employee-benefits group counsel many large pension and health-benefit funds, and those attorneys, along with our litigators, represent such funds in litigation at all levels of the court system.
Our attorneys also regularly participate in collective bargaining. We are often at the table negotiating on behalf of public- and private-sector workers in the full range of occupations, from public safety workers to local musicians to professional athletes. We also advise union leaders on strategies and tactics away from the bargaining table to achieve better wages and working conditions for their members.
WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT
The firm is unique in combining the resources normally associated with a much larger firm with the collegiality and efficiency of a smaller firm. We bring together both the breadth of knowledge of generalists and the depth of knowledge of specialists to provide the highest quality representation to our clients. Our highly experienced members and of-counsel attorneys work in tandem with more recent law school graduates of exceptional ability and commitment. Our work is challenging, but our firm is collegial and informal, populated by people who are intellectually curious and enjoy talking through all sides of an issue with colleagues.
Our clients and our attorneys both benefit from the firm’s non-hierarchical approach to practice. We staff matters leanly. New associate attorneys are not shunted aside simply to write memoranda, but work as active members of a team, participating directly in the firm’s representation of clients. The firm provides new associate attorneys substantial supervision as well as a continuing in-house training program. Our attorneys have access to the resources and support they need to provide top-flight representation, including highly-trained paralegals and state-of-the-art computerized litigation tools.
OUR CLIENTS
Our union clients include a wide range of labor organizations, from the two million health care, building service, and public sector workers of the Service Employees International Union to the small group of top-tier athletes of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team Players Association and other professional sports; from the teachers of the National Education Association to the aviators of the Allied Pilots Associations and the hotel workers of Washington, D.C.; along with steel workers, auto workers, airport baggage handlers, and many others in nearly every line of work.
The experience and skills that we developed in the areas of litigation, employee-benefits counseling, and negotiations on behalf of unions and union-related benefit funds led naturally to our expansion into representing progressive nonprofit institutions unrelated to labor organizations, including MoveOn, a well known progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee.
Our benefit plan clients are similarly diverse, ranging from pension funds to health funds, to training funds and other joint labor-management projects, large and small. The workers protected by these funds include the industrial workers in the steel, auto, paper, and bakery industries, the professional athletes of Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League, building service workers throughout the country, and public employees in many States.
We also continue to represent individuals in employment-related matters, in certain criminal cases, and in connection with government investigations.
OUR COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE
While the firm has grown in many ways since its founding, Bredhoff today maintains the same commitment to excellence as it did at its inception. Members of the firm regularly appear on lists of the best labor and employment lawyers in the country, and our attorneys include a former National Labor Relations Board General Counsel, as well as general counsels of large unions, benefit funds, and nonprofits.
Our trademark, and our pride, is the high quality of our work. Whether we are writing a brief, working with our clients on negotiation strategy, or cross-examining a witness, we believe our clients deserve the highest level of skill, and the most informed and rigorous judgment.