Collazo Carling & Mish LLP is in its seventeenth year of service. Don T. Carmody and Ernest J. Collazo established the Firm as Carmody & Collazo on November 1, 1991, as a firm concentrating in labor relations and employment law and litigation on behalf of management. The name of the Firm was changed to Collazo & Mish LLP on March 1, 1996, when Risa Mish, who had become a partner in 1995, became a name partner, and was changed to Collazo Carling & Mish LLP on March 1, 1997, when Francis Carling, who had been a senior partner and the head of the labor and employment law group at Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, became a partner at the Firm. On March 6, 2000, the Firm added Tonianne Florentino as its fourth partner. On January 1, 2007, John P. Keil became its fifth partner. Prior to the establishment of the Firm, Mr. Collazo, as well as Ms. Mish and Ms. Florentino, were with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where Mr. Collazo was a partner for ten years.

B. The Founding Rationale

The Firm was founded in the recognition that as law firm clients were increasingly demanding a more competitive rate structure, and a more streamlined and efficient approach to the provision of legal services, the ideal opportunity had arisen to establish a boutique firm staffed with exceptional legal talent priced at competitive rates.

Because the partners of the Firm previously practiced with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, the Firm has always used established corporate law firms of this caliber as the benchmark against which the Firm measures itself in terms of quality of work product and client service. At the same time, however, the Firm is able to provide significant cost savings to clients in comparison to these larger competitors, both because of our lower overhead and because of our staffing philosophy. The Firm takes care to staff work assignments in the leanest possible fashion and to give all of our clients the benefit of the knowledge base that we have already built up over our many years of practice in this field. We do not generate research memos where a direct response to an inquiry will suffice, and we do not multiple-bill clients for tasks that can largely be accomplished by a single attorney, or by an attorney working with minimal partner supervision. This lean staffing approach, combined with the fact that the Firm's hourly billing rates are, on average, 25-40% less than those charged by large corporate law firm competitors, results in a substantial economic savings for clients, without any diminution in the quality of legal services rendered.