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As a lawyer, you can never be too careful.
Miles Scully, a business litigation attorney for Gordon & Rees LLP's San Diego office, thought nothing of it when a man threatened to kill him after being ruled against in a telecom fraud case. Later, the man was arrested for attempting to murder his wife.
"So I guess I should have been a little more worried about it than I thought," Scully says now, somewhat lightheartedly. Scully continues to stay on his toes, working hard to retain his position in one of San Diego's fastest-growing law firms, which has increased its staff by more than 100 percent every year since 1998.
Originally, San Francisco-based Gordon & Rees didn't plan to open a San Diego office. It happened by chance.
In 1990, Scully's colleague, Gery Zacher, came to San Diego to represent the defendants in a class-action lawsuit over life insurance benefits brought by the local law firm of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP. Scully followed to help. They obtained a favorable judgment and decided that San Diego was where they wanted to stay.
Together they started a branch in San Diego with six attorneys, which grew to 10 attorneys in 1998 and quadrupled in size to 45 attorneys this year.
"It's been a lot of fun," Scully says of working in San Diego. "When we were 10 attorneys, I remember telling people that I wanted us to be 50 attorneys in five years, and people would say, 'You can't do that.' But if you just...