Hi, my name is Alex Granovsky. I’m the Managing Member of Granovsky & Sundaresh. We’re a labor and employment law firm headquartered in New York City.
We formed this firm about 12 years ago, and before that my entire career pretty much had been working for big law firms. Obviously, going from a big law firm representing large corporations to a smaller law firm representing individuals meant making a lot of changes. And the work is different.
A lot of people ask me, “What are the big differences?” The biggest difference really, is the transition from representing corporations to representing individuals. And not just individuals, but to represent regular people, which has been an absolute privilege. When I was in big law, my clients were these huge corporations. And the people that I talked to were their lawyers, in house counsel, some fancy business person or somebody who moved up the corporate ladder enough that now they’re talking to a lawyer about a lawsuit.
These are people who are experienced with the law, with business, and understand the system. They’re sophisticated and experienced with the legal system. Now, our clients are often less experienced with the legal system. They’re no less smart, but they might be a little bit less sophisticated or a little bit less educated than some of the people that I previously represented. And so that made me have to change some of how I communicate, some of how I present what we’re doing and what our options are to our clients. It took some learning on my part.
The hardest part for me to learn, really, was that as much as we all like to think of ourselves as a regular old, average person, the truth is by dint of my circumstance, privilege, luck, ability, whatever, frankly, a combination of all of them, I was lucky enough to get a college degree to have these big law jobs and clerkships.
To get to where I am now, which isn’t average, it’s a fortunate position to be in. While that gave me a lot in common with my prior clients, it means that for my current clients, I had to do a lot of learning. It wasn’t initially easy, but it’s totally been worth it. Listen, doing plaintiff side employment work is a privilege because on a good day, and we have a lot of good days, you get to be a civil rights lawyer helping ordinary people fight back for what’s right. And that’s the best thing of all.
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