ABOUT
The method came from the path.
Fifteen years in employment law, on both sides of the aisle. A method born of an indirect path, so your organization does not have to take one.
WHERE IT BEGAN
I learned the plaintiff's side first.
I started on the plaintiff's side because that was the market, but it was not where I wanted to be. As the son of a New York small business owner and the grandson of a Korean War veteran and accountant, I was raised with the belief that a business's purpose was to provide service to as many people as possible. I understood that a threat to an organization, whether a small business, a nonprofit, or an educational program, is a threat to everyone that organization serves. So I treated those early years as the chance to learn how the people who bring cases against employers think: how they exploit the gaps inside a workforce to build a claim.
Later in their careers, many defense lawyers go to the plaintiff's side to make more money. I went toward the businesses. I believed then what I believe now: an entire workforce, from the frontline to ownership, can thrive together, in service of each other and of everyone the organization exists to serve.
I learned how the people who bring these cases think, so I could protect employers from them.
THE DEFENSE SIDE
The better part of a decade defending employers.
Later, my work centered on defending employers: wage-and-hour class actions, PAGA, USDOL, and DLSE matters. These cases carry their own skill set, because the exposure often rises and falls with the data. Understanding the data gave me a window into the inner workings of a workforce, and it equipped me to deliver for my clients, at times through methods other attorneys would call unconventional or creative.
Then came a point where I could not reconcile the data with the claims. Case after case, something did not add up, and the pattern cost me sleep. Companies with near-perfect compliance were facing multi-million dollar litigation. Plaintiffs who received an average meal period of 59.2 minutes sued for systematic meal period deprivation. Organizations that prided themselves on their policies, procedures, and systems were sued anyway.
Colleagues told me this was the cost of doing business, and that an employer's only recourse was more training, more policies, and treating employees like children. None of it sat right with me. There had to be a better way.
I worked backwards from the litigation to figure out what was going on. What I found was a gap between what the organization had on paper and what was reaching the people doing the work: the same gaps I had watched plaintiff's lawyers exploit for years, though they did not realize that was what they were exploiting.
Nor did I, until I did.
THE BEACH METHOD
The method the path was pointing to.
I was not doing enough in my capacity as a class action defense attorney. I was not living up to the belief I was raised with: that an organization exists to render service, and that protecting one protects everyone that organization serves.
So I founded The BEACH Method and built the analysis at its center: Structural Workforce Risk and Exposure Analysis. The same method I have used in class actions for years, applied to your workforce before anything is filed. Not legal advice, and not a substitute for it. A structural analysis of the gap between paper and practice, and a plan of attack on what it finds.
The path here was not a straight line. That is exactly why the method exists.
WHO I DO THIS FOR
For-profit, nonprofit, and early childhood. One gap.
For owner-operators, because I am the son of one. I know what a business costs the family that builds it, and what a claim can take from them.
For nonprofit leaders, because I have sat across from executive directors processing what litigation actually means: services disrupted, program money reallocated to defense, and the people the mission exists to serve going without. I got tired of watching that.
For early childhood and Head Start programs, because zero to five is the most critical window in a person's life, and litigation there lands on children. Where federal funding is the program, the stakes are higher still.
Three different people. The same gap.
Employer and Employee. Undivided.