By The Schenk Law Firm

The Schenk Law Firm, a San Diego trial boutique launched this week by veteran mass torts litigator Frederick Schenk, might on its face look like a family firm.

Schenk, who has been with personal injury firm Casey Gerry. Schenk Francavilla Blatt & Penfield LLP for over 40 years, hung the shingle alongside his son Benjamin Schenk and his sister, former U.S. Rep. Lynn Schenk.

But Frederick and Benjamin Schenk both say that while the firm is designed to carry on the Schenk legacy, they’re hoping it’ll grow beyond family ties.

For now though, the firm is a push and pull between two wizened elders and a freshly minted trial lawyer. There are decades of experience shared between the two siblings: Frederick, who was a pioneer in asbestos and utility power line cases in Southern California, and Lynn, who not only served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 1995, but was also the California governor’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2003, commissioner of the California Medical Assistance Commission until 2006, and co-founder of the gender-equity-focused Lawyers Club of San Diego.

Benjamin Schenk

Benjamin, at 34, brings a small amount of trial experience at Fell Law, but a lot of fervor and expertise in business and entrepreneurship as the founder of The Civic Group LLC, a commercial real estate investment and asset management firm.

Law360 Pulse caught up with Benjamin and Frederick Schenk to discuss the privilege of getting to work together as a father-son duo and their respective visions for the new firm. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for a Schenk family law firm come about?

Frederick: I’ve been practicing law for 46 years — 42 of them at Casey Gerry. When I first started, I was the fifth lawyer and we had maybe a dozen to 15 staff. The years went on and I moved up the letterhead. We have now grown to a staff of about 60, including lawyers, and I came to realize that I want to go back to my roots and have a small practice.

I’ve had the great honor of training dozens of lawyers who’ve gone on to have really profound impacts in their careers. And my son decided a few years ago that he wanted to become a trial lawyer. I thought this would be an opportunity to have this legacy continue on beyond the people that I’ve trained at Casey Gerry, and to now carry it forward with someone who bears my last name. I wanted to have an opportunity to take the time to train and work with Benjamin, who I think is a brilliant legal mind. He’s so smart, he’s very endearing, and he works so hard, and hopefully I can give him the opportunity to learn from me and work with me and others, and develop a practice that will continue this legacy that my sister and I created in our own professional lives, and now pass it on to Benjamin, who I think will surpass both of us, honestly. So that was really the impetus.

Benjamin: In many ways, I joke that this has been in the making for about 35 years. I’m almost 35 years old. Growing up, we’d sit around the table and have dinner as a family and my dad would share stories about his clients. I grew up with the values of being a consumer advocate and fighting for the folks who aren’t always able to fight for themselves, but I took a different path right out of college. I worked with a hedge fund. I worked in tech, in real estate. I wanted to try a lot of different things and not just do what my dad did.

Then I got to a point where I had gone to law school, I passed the bar, and I started to think about becoming a master of a craft. And I’ll be honest, I read an ESPN article about LeBron James and his son and their goal of wanting to play on the same court together. And something struck a chord in me from that article. I thought, what an awesome end goal in and of itself? Just to be able to play the same game with someone you love and respect.

Do you want the firm to be known as a family firm?

Benjamin: I hesitate to call it a family business. It definitely is right now, but I just want to work with people who share my values: the pursuit of excellence, and standing up for those who may not necessarily have the resources to advocate for themselves. And it just so happens that we’re starting this firm with three people who share the same last name and share those values. But I think life is just so enriching when you have the opportunity to work with people who see the world and approach the world in the same way as you, and that is by no means limited to people with the last name Schenk.

Frederick: It’s starting out with the three of us, but if there are good people that we want to add to the mix, we will certainly do that. But I’m just proud that we’re the genesis of it. The three of us.

What are you hoping to accomplish with the firm?

Frederick: I was appointed to the steering committee for the social media addiction mass tort program in Los Angeles, and I had served on the steering committee for the NFL head injury MDL in Philadelphia, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to expand our footprint in making a difference in more of the mass tort litigation and catastrophic injury litigation. I have spent quite a bit of time over the last 42 years in mass torts; it is really where I have made my most, I think, visible impact. I’d been involved in the original mass tort, which was asbestos litigation.

We’re going to be a smaller practice, but we will be very selective about the cases we accept. I’ve always prided myself, even in the asbestos litigation, of knowing my clients, knowing their spouses, visiting with them, and I don’t want to lose that relationship-based practice. Benjamin just recently settled a case for $5 million and the client wrote him a lovely note, thanking him for making a profound difference in her life. She lost her husband. To me, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality. Not every client needs our kind of help. We really want to focus our representation on those that will truly benefit from our experience and our many years of being in the trenches.

Frederick, both you and your sister have these really long and very different careers. Have you ever considered working together before this?

Frederick: Lynn and I have been each other’s biggest cheerleaders in our very different career paths. When she ran for Congress, I was out there, literally walking the precincts for her with Benjamin in tow as a 2-year-old. When she was working in Sacramento, I was so proud of the work she did, representing the interests of all Californians in the governor’s office as chief of staff.

There’s a lot of ways our practices are different, but one thing that I think Lynn will overlap well with what I do is policy and working with governmental entities in trying to find ways that we might be able to help. For example, years and years ago, I was one of the attorneys that represented the state of California in the tobacco litigation, and California recovered many billions of dollars against the tobacco industry for their expenses paid for medical patients who suffered from tobacco-related cancers or lung diseases. There are so many unfortunate circumstances where governments are put to task to pay for the bad conduct of other people. So I’m hoping that there will be opportunities for us to help governmental entities, when there is a need. All too often, there is no effort to recoup those losses.

They’re just worn by the state and suffered by the taxpayers, and we think that it’s a little unconscionable to make taxpayers suffer those consequences. So we have a track record for showing that there is a remedy, and we hope to be able to carry that forward. And so that’s an area where Lynn can help on public policy and work in creating relationships.

There’s a real contrast between two of you having multiple decades under your belt, and then Benjamin being fresh to law. What’s the benefit to that dynamic?

 Benjamin: It’s kind of a match made in heaven. There’s this trust that is just natural with people who — and this may not be the case with all families, but certainly with ours — love and respect each other. I certainly defer to my dad’s subject matter expertise, and from a business operations, marketing and technology perspective, I teach him things. We’re learning from each other in a really dynamic way.

I’m also so grateful for the experiences that I’ve had before starting this practice. They all prepared me for what is the most daunting reality of starting any business, which is that it all starts and stops with you, from the [customer relationship management] on the back end, to making sure every pleading or motion is filed correctly. Thankfully, I’m not answering the phones anymore, but I was for a point. I worked at a venture-backed, seed-stage startup, and I started a company myself, so I knew what I was signing up for. But the difference is that in the other business, I was just on my own. Being able to work with my dad and bounce ideas off my aunt, it’s a different level.

Frederick: Benjamin’s already been in trial, but I’m looking forward to trying cases with him. He was a government major and a theater minor at Dartmouth, so he presents well in front of people. Being a father, having the opportunity to work with your children in a professional way is so exciting. I have a daughter who’s a first-year law student at the San Diego School of Law. She’s telling us that one day she wants to come and work at the firm. And she will be another outstanding trial lawyer. I know her. So it’s really about taking what I’ve learned over 46 years and passing those skills on to the next generation. That’s what I’m really excited about achieving. 

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