Who Is Carl Volz?
Pontem Law was founded in 2018 to help address serious failures in the market for legal services for individuals, new and young businesses that have made it all but impossible for those individuals and businesses to get the legal advice they need at prices they can afford. Ironically, these failures were caused by the very law firms claiming to serve these markets, and these same firms have taken advantage of the inefficiencies and market failures they created to grow into enormous multi-national entities and reap unconscionable profits for their partners. This inexorable drive for higher profits and the need to maintain (and grow) their unwieldy international footprints have driven these firms to raise their prices even higher and employ business practices intended solely to extract more money from their clients – regardless of the impact those prices and practices have on clients they claim to serve.
Economic theory teaches that when services are being offered at prices not driven by market conditions – uncompetitive prices – new players should enter the market and help push prices back down to where they should be. But here, the market has been hopelessly distorted by the self-serving marketing and extractive business practices used by the firms that created the problem in the first place. Markets can only self-regulate and correct inefficiencies when businesses have adequate information to make rational decisions. But Big Law has normalized exorbitant hourly rates and created a false equivalence between price and quality, making it difficult for even the most experienced clients to believe they can get quality legal representation at affordable prices. Big Law’s whitewash has been so effective that even most lawyers believe their rates are reasonable, or even necessary. This further distorts the legal market as the lawyers and law firms that might otherwise enter and disrupt the market end up chasing the Big Law business model; i.e. they charge the maximum rates they can get away with and they use the same extractive business practices employed by Big Law because they know that’s where the big money is. Individuals and small businesses, unable to find good legal services at affordable prices, either try to do their legal work without lawyers (wasting countless hours trying to learn the law from Google) or simply ignore important legal obligations altogether.
Carl Volz, the founder of Pontem Law, worked in the trenches at Big Law law firms for more than 20 years, defending mature companies, their officers, directors and employees in lawsuits that were often caused by the companies’ failure to get sound legal advice when they
were new, or young. While he was extraordinarily successful in defending these companies and individuals, he saw first-hand how disruptive – and destructive – litigation can be, especially when clients were paying Big Law rates for the services he was providing. After fighting
the system from within for more than a decade, Carl realized he wasn’t going to change the legal market on his own and decided to start Pontem Law, with two main goals in mind. First, Pontem will help individuals, new and young businesses build the systems they need to prevent, avoid or quickly resolve disputes before they erupt into full-blown litigation. And second, when disputes prove intractable and cannot be avoided, prevented or quickly resolved, Pontem will provide exceptional legal representation for lawsuits, government inquiries and internal investigations at prices commensurate with the risks its clients face.