Randazzo & Randazzo is a New York practice focused on a single area of law. By design.
We are two attorneys, two offices, and one practice. Sheryl works from Huntington, on Long Island. Ralph works from Park Avenue South in Manhattan, Huntington, and Fire Island Pines. When a client needs us somewhere else, we meet them somewhere else.
Every client works directly with Sheryl or Ralph. Not with an associate, not with a paralegal handling the relationship while the partner signs the documents. The person sitting across the table is the person whose name is on the door.
This is a deliberate scale. Estate planning, elder law, guardianship, and the “administration” of an estate or a client’s affairs that require attorney assistance – doing so well depends on listening carefully, for as long as it takes, to our client. Growth, in the conventional sense, would dilute our approach to the way we practice law.
Between us, we have over sixty years in this practice.
Our work begins with a conversation. Most of what makes a plan right or wrong is established there, well before any document is drafted. We need to understand what the client would like to accomplish or to protect, who they are trying to protect it for, and what they want their life to look like in the years ahead. That understanding is not ancillary to the legal work; it is the foundation of it.
Once a client has decided how they wish to proceed, we move without delay. Documents are drafted, reviewed together, refined where necessary, and executed promptly. Clients who have made up their minds should not be kept waiting.
We do not work from templates or packages, and we do not recommend the same instruments to every client. Each plan is built from the particular circumstances of the person in front of us, and written in language they can read, understand, and one day explain to the people who will rely on it.
Most of our new clients come to us through people we have already worked with. Their children become our clients. Their friends become our clients. Over the years, we have served some families across three generations. We are appreciative and humbled by the confidence of our clients and we are honored by their referrals. We serve all with the same level of professionalism, expertise and respect.
Our work sits at the moments in a life that ask the most of a person: illness, the loss of someone close, decisions about how to be cared for when one can no longer decide for themself, the question of what to leave behind for the people who will outlive us, and the proactive anticipation of such events. Clients rely on us in those moments, often telling us things they have not told anyone else; they trust us to help them effectuate decisions they sometimes postponed for years.
That responsibility is not something one grows used to, and we have not. We continue to find this work meaningful in ways we did not anticipate when we began, and it is the reason both of us are still doing it. We consider our opportunity to provide legal representation to others in this way as a calling.
