History

Ward and Smith, P.A. is the successor to a practice founded in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1895. Our firm is composed of 80 attorneys and an additional 200 support staff members who serve clients locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally from offices in Asheville, Greenville, New Bern, Raleigh, and Wilmington.

The firm is committed to quality and responsiveness and to building and maintaining a relationship with every client. We understand that our clients' needs are unique. We strive to learn about those needs and to deliver a product tailored to meet them. We also often form teams of knowledgeable professionals, from within the firm, from outside the firm, and from related disciplines, to develop strategies to help our clients prepare for future challenges and overcome current obstacles.

The quality and responsiveness of our representation are reflected in our consistently receiving the highest ratings available by the most recognized legal rating authorities. The BTI Consulting Group, Inc., has conducted nearly 1,300 independent interviews with general counsel and key decision makers that hire law firms. Ward and Smith is included in BTI’s Client Service A-Team. David L. Ward, Jr. is one of only 113 attorneys nationwide and the only attorney in North Carolina included in the BTI Client Service All-Star Team. Sixteen of our attorneys are included in the publication The Best Lawyers in America. Two of our attorneys have been inducted into the North Carolina Bar Association Hall of Fame. Sixteen of our attorneys have been selected as “Legal Elite” from peer-review surveys published in Business North Carolina, one of whom is a member of the Legal Elite Hall of Fame in the field of corporate counsel. Fourteen of our attorneys are designated as “Super Lawyers” by North Carolina Super Lawyers. More than 88 percent of our attorneys, with at least seven years of experience, have been rated by their peers as being “very high” and “preeminent” in their respective fields of law, as published by the most recognized attorney rating directory. We are proud of these accomplishments and recognize that we could not have achieved them without our clients.

Our organizational structure reflects our clients’ needs. We maintain practice groups for quality assurance, efficiency, and specialized client needs. Attorneys in each group, in addition to their general legal training, focus their individual practices in one or more specific fields. Areas of legal representation requested most frequently by our clients include the following:

We work seamlessly as a single team by drawing on attorneys from different practice sections or groups who are best qualified to address clients' problems. The firm has a strategic objective that at least two attorneys will have extensive, in depth experience in the more than 25 sub-specialties related to the noted areas of representation. This assures our clients that their special needs are always covered. Our philosophy is that our clients' regular attorneys may call on other attorneys in the firm whose knowledge and experience allow them to serve clients' particular needs more efficiently.

We advocate a proactive and preventive approach to our clients' legal issues so that, through proper planning and maintenance, our clients can avoid legal difficulties and attendant costs. We believe that proactive management provides our clients with responsive, high-quality, and cost-effective legal services. We work to become fully acquainted with the management style and operations of our clients to enable us to provide timely and effective legal services. We are committed to providing frequent and full communication to our clients with respect to pending and anticipated legal issues that may affect them.

At Ward and Smith, developing a strong attorney-client relationship is a top priority. An attorney, and often a paralegal, meets with a new client to understand the client's needs and how we can best serve those needs. We feel strongly that an effective attorney-client relationship requires open and candid communication; therefore, discussing and understanding the client's goals is important to us. We explain the legal issues involved, our plan to assist the client, and our fee schedule. We encourage our clients to inquire in advance concerning the cost of legal services. Our policy is to confirm the service to be provided and our fee arrangement in an initial engagement letter or to discuss them with the client personally.

We also encourage our clients to call their attorneys or paralegals whenever they have questions or concerns. Our clients tell us that we are responsive and accessible because our attorneys make themselves available, at work or at home, in or out of the office, and we make every effort to return calls promptly. An attorney is never more than a local telephone call away. Clients may reach their attorneys by calling the office nearest them. We always provide clients with the home and cell phone numbers of all attorneys assisting a client.

Ward and Smith is committed to maintaining the latest in information systems capabilities. The firm currently has more than 90 legal applications that support a wide variety of needs from research in all areas of the law to management and control of thousands of documents in complex litigation. The firm employs the latest technology in our legal and information research, litigation support, and document preparation, including automated searches of indexes and full text of our own past briefs, memoranda, discovery documents, contracts, and legal forms. We utilize our video conferencing facilities to conserve the time and expense of depositions. We archive databases of expert witnesses, mediators, arbitrators, and transcripts of depositions for future reference. Our information systems are accessible to our personnel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, in all our offices and from anywhere in the world through a secure, remote-access network. The firm makes extensive use of the Internet to communicate internally and with clients in an immediate and efficient manner while maintaining the security of confidential matters.

In summary, the collective mission of our attorneys, paralegals, and administrative staff is to provide clients with exceptional service.