MARSHALL R. COLE

Marshall R. Cole has been in practice for 14 years and quickly rose through the ranks as one of the top professional liability attorneys in Southern California.

“In order to successfully defend a lawyer, knowing how the brain of a lawyer works is very important, and you only really get to know that if you represent them for years and years,” Cole said.

He has seen success in representing many high-profile licensed professionals through all aspects of litigation. He also handles numerous complex civil litigation matters arising out of real estate disputes, sexual harassment claims and contract-related disputes. He credits a large part of that success to his father, Jon Cole, who founded the firm in 1984. “I learned from the absolute best.”

“Professional liability is the only type of law that I have ever practiced, and at this point, as a certified specialist, it’s in my blood,” he said. “As the years went by, I had the great fortune of being able to learn a tremendous amount from my father, specifically, in how to defend lawyers as clients whose cases can present a lot of complex and difficult problems to solve.”

In 2021, while representing an undisclosed national law firm, Cole and his team obtained a defense arbitration award in a $20 million legal malpractice action brought by a publicly traded company. “It was a high-stakes case with really bad facts all around,” he explained. “Through our diligent hard work, we just kept our heads down and presented our case very effectively to show the arbitrators that our clients didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what we do in all of our cases.”

The reason Cole loves professional liability work so much is because “every single case presents a dramatically different set of facts and the law that you have to learn in order to apply it to those cases is always interesting,” he said. “I take great pride in defending lawyers, who are oftentimes just as nervous as any other client involved in litigation because litigation is stressful. We, as a firm, try to make the experience of going through litigation as easy as possible, and I like to think that our clients appreciate the personalized approach we take in each of our cases. We truly value the relationships that we build during our cases.”

Cole credits a large portion of this success to networking and relationship building. “When people come to our firm, we don’t just see it as another case. Rather, we see it as an opportunity to build a relationship with a lawyer or a firm which will enable us to assist them in the future with any type of matter. That’s why I really love having relationships with lawyers in Los Angeles.”

One such example of this is where Cole has recently assumed the lead counsel role in a lawyer dispute involving an eight-year litigation battle between his clients, David and Laura Drexler, and their former employee, Gerald Ryckman, in relation to a real estate dispute and other related claims. Ryckman v. Drexler, BC645026 (L.A. Sup Ct., filed Dec. 27, 2016).

As lead counsel, his firm is handling the last appeal and other litigation efforts, “which will likely require Mr. Ryckman to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees,” Cole said. “Mr. Drexler came to us in 2022 to close the lid on an eight-year legal battle regarding the ownership of a property. We’re batting cleanup to basically get this thing done for him so that Mr. Drexler can finally have some peace.”

“Our hope is with the various appeals that are pending, we’re going to, one-by-one, knock them all off and get the various judgments affirmed,” Cole said. “Mr. Drexler is going to have judgments in his favor, and the property that they own will be partitioned … So hopefully, Mr. Drexler will end up getting 100% of the proceeds because of the fee awards and his interest in the property.”

He explains that following in the footsteps of his father wasn’t easy. “That was the biggest challenge for me. I knew I was never going to fill those shoes, so I had to put some shoes right next to his and be my own lawyer by building my own results and success.”

– Devon Belcher