Mike Lombardi - February 2020

Mike Lombardi - February 2020

LombardiLawOffice.com Office: 401-751-6100 Cell: 401-654-0000

February 2020

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The Power of an All-Star Team How Trust Enables Us to Push Harder and Dig Deeper

My office manager, Sulay Martinez, is one of the team’s starting players. She’s worked with me since I first passed the bar and became a lawyer. We both spent 10 years at another firm together, then she agreed to join me at Mike Lombardi & Associates when we opened our doors five years ago. I’ve also worked with two of my case managers, Imary Alicea and Lilybeth Torres, for 15 years. Because we all know each other so well, we have complete trust in each other’s abilities, and that allows us to focus all of our energy on our clients. We work harder and dig deeper than many other law firms are willing to, in part because we’re always pushing each other to do the best we can. The power of this type of teamwork really became clear to me on a recent criminal case, when we took on a client who was accused of smoking marijuana while serving a home confinement sentence. He was facing a year in prison for the charge, but he disputed the drug test, claiming he hadn’t smoked in months. The state argued that wasn’t possible, because he’d failed a drug test and, they claimed, marijuana only lasts 30 days in a person’s system. In this situation, most lawyers would probably tell the client what they’d consider “the hard truth”— basically, “You’re screwed, and it’s over”— but my team refused to accept that. We pushed each other to look harder at the drug test results, and in the end, we went so far as to hire a Department of Defense expert who specialized in forensic drug testing. That expert ended up drafting a forensic toxicology report that proved the method and manner of the Department of Corrections’ testing was archaic and outdated: It was based on old >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

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