One Year In

The call came in on a Tuesday.

A small business owner. Ten employees. A wage complaint filed with the Department of Labor. She had run her business for six years without a single legal problem, and now she was holding a notice she did not understand, from an agency she had never dealt with, about a violation she did not know she had committed.

She was not looking for a lecture. She was not looking for a law review article. She wanted someone to tell her what was happening, what it meant, and how to fix it.

That is the call I built this firm to answer.

A year ago, I did not know if the phone would ring

When I filed the paperwork for Jacobs & Associates, I had no inherited client list, and no way of knowing whether any of it would work. What I had was a simple conviction: employers deserve clear, practical advice without the jargon and the runaround, and workers deserve an attorney who takes their claims seriously. Employment law, done right.

Then the phone rang. And it kept ringing.

What a year actually looked like

Phone calls. Teams meetings. Courthouse filings. Negotiated settlements. Compliance audits. Handbook rewrites. DOL investigations. More than a few 10 PM emails from employers who had just found a problem they did not know they had. It was not glamorous. There were no verdicts on the evening news. There was a lot of paperwork, a lot of listening, and a lot of people on both sides of a paycheck trying to navigate a system that was never built to be easy.

That is the work. A year in, it is still the part that matters most.

Done Right, every Monday

I launched the Done Right newsletter the same week I opened the firm. More than forty-five issues later, week after week, I have written on minimum wage, documentation, leave law, tip credits, termination risk, and wage theft, one plain-English piece at a time. Since February, the focus has been the Paper Trail to Hell series, more than two dozen pieces on a single idea: the fastest way to lose an employment case is bad documentation, and the fastest way to survive one is good documentation.

I never wanted it to sound like a law firm. I wanted it to sound like the attorney you wish you had called before things went sideways. If you have been reading, thank you. The strange questions make the best columns, so keep sending them.

To the clients who trusted me first

Someone has to be the first client. Someone has to call before there are results to point to, before there are reviews to read, before there is a track record to cite. The people who came in during year one hired a conversation. That took real trust, and I have not forgotten a single one of those calls. The work we did together is what turned an idea into a firm.

To the people who sent them

Almost every client I have came the same way: someone said, you should call Lee. Colleagues, accountants, brokers, friends, former clients. Every one of those introductions put someone else’s reputation on the line. I repay that the only way that counts, by taking care of the people you send me.

Year Two

The team is growing. We have opened a second office at 11 Broadway, Suite 615, in New York. The newsletter keeps going. The caseload grows. The firm gets sharper.

And if a bag with my logo shows up at your door this month, that is not an accident. It holds groceries, gym clothes, and exactly zero employment law problems. The last part is still my job.

The plan for year two is the same as year one: show up, do the work, give people honest answers. There is nothing clever about it. One year down, many more to go.

Thank you, to every client, colleague, and reader. This is exactly what I hoped it would be.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Lee N. Jacobs

Jacobs & Associates LLC

^{This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For guidance on your specific situation, consult a qualified employment attorney. ATTORNEY ADVERTISING. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. © 2026 Jacobs & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.}