Why a Griffin

Most law firms pick a symbol about power. We picked one about custody.

The griffin is half eagle, half lion — the king of the air and the king of the ground fused into a single animal. But what griffins actually do, in every tradition where they appear, is guard. They guarded gold in the Greek accounts. They were painted flanking the throne at Knossos, on either side of the seat of judgment. And in the medieval bestiaries they were said to mate for life, which is why you find them carved on tombs. The griffin is the thing that stays.

That is the practice. A family places a mother in a facility, or a man walks into a hospital, and they are handing the most precious thing they have to an institution that promised to keep it safe. When that institution fails and then papers over the failure, someone has to stand where the guardian was supposed to be standing. That is the job.

The two halves matter as much as the whole. The eagle is the part of this work nobody sees — reading the audit trail, tracing the corporate ownership, finding the chart entry made three hours after the patient was already gone. That is altitude and patience. The lion is the courtroom. You need both, and a firm that has only one of them will lose to a defense carrier every time.

There is a personal layer to it as well. I came to law through the Marine Corps, as an aircraft firefighter and an EMT. My first job was running toward people on the worst day of their lives. The griffin is a creature that watches from above and fights on the ground. I did not choose it to be clever. I chose it because it was already true.

— D.L. Rencher, Esq., Managing Attorney

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