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Offense to Defense
LEGAL ENTREPRENEUR by Isabelle Gan | Contributing Writer
To nearly everyone who knows David Haenel, the up and coming attorney is always speeding along. Ironic for a traffic defense lawyer.
"He always does things at a hundred miles an hour," says Jeannie Barbato, a legal assistant at the 12th Judicial District in Sarasota who has worked closely with Haenel in the past. "He never stops."
Haenel can usually be seen speeding - within the legal limits, of course - around downtown Sarasota in his colorful Segway, a motorized scooter that serves as a moving billboard for his firm's Web site: www.fightyourtickets.com.
His almost two-year-old practice, Finebloom & Haenel, which he owns with partner Darren Finebloom, has quickly become among the best known firms in town when it comes to defending traffic citation cases, including speeding tickets, DUIs (driving while under the influence) and DWLSs (driving while license suspended).
The firm recently opened an office in Tampa, launched a new Web site, www.fightyourcase.com and hired three new lawyers.
"We fight tickets and criminal cases from Charlotte to Tampa. We zealously fight to keep points off of people's licenses," said the 35-year-old Haenel. "We have answered phone calls 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week since we started this service. We are driven."
A radical jump
It's a radical jump for Haenel, who until three years ago, was on the other side of the courtroom, prosecuting DUIs for the Sarasota state attorney's office.
Haenel has a ready answer for the inevitable question of why he switched sides.
"I get that question all the time," he says. "I realized that there was a need for somebody to do not only traffic ticket defense but criminal traffic defense. Everyone is entitled to representation.
"Clearly you will always have people who think you're a traitor. That's just the nature of people. But guess what? Some of my best source of referrals is from law enforcement officers."
A big part of his success as a defender he and colleagues say, stems from his reputation as an accomplished prosecutor. In 2004, just before leaving the prosecutor's office, Haenel was named the DUI prosecutor of the year by the state. The advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving has also honored Haenel.
Says Haenel: "Who better knows the opposite side than someone who's been on the opposite side?"
During his three-and-a-half years as a prosecutor, Haenel became known as a sharp-witted, resourceful attorney. Aside from prosecuting cases, he also traveled around the state, training other prosecutors in traffic law.
"When he left, there was a lot of angst around the state because he was a very good prosecutor," says Earl Varn, division chief at the 12th Judicial District and Haenel's former boss. "He could find out so much information, more so than anybody who'd worked for me."
Varn recalls how in many DUI cases, Haenel would be the first to gather credit card receipts from a bar to prove that a defendant had more to drink than he had claimed.
Making connections
Haenel was equally impressive when it came to making connections. He befriended law enforcement officers, often riding with them and getting to know them on a personal basis.
"He could find prior DUIs (for suspects) in other states," Varn adds, "because he had a good relationships with the driver's license bureaus."
That's how Haenel met Finebloom, his current partner.
"We used to battle in court all the time," says Finebloom, who was then an attorney with the public defender's office. "David was one of the few prosecutors I could go to if I had a defense to a case. And I wouldn't feel that he would use whatever I was giving him against me."
When the two eventually decided to leave their jobs and form Finebloom & Haenel, they agreed to focus on defending traffic citations, an area few in Sarasota were specializing in.
Haenel's switch from prosecutor to defender started in December 2004. At that time, the partners had a few thousand dollars in savings and a $1,000 check from Finebloom's grandmother - $5,000 in total to start the business.
They rented a tiny office on Sarasota's East Avenue and printed and sent out some black and white flyers. Then they waited for the phone to ring.
"I was very nervous," says Finebloom. "We didn't get any calls for three weeks."
In the next year, as more cases came in, Haenel fine-tuned the firm's marketing campaign. He launched the fightyourtickets.com site and a toll free number, 1-888-FIGHTIT.
Last year, the firm bought a 1,000-square-foot office on Wallace Avenue. It also received some local and national notoriety after the partners represented Barry Seltzer, the retired Sarasota real estate investor who was accused of aiming his car at Rep. Katherine Harris and her supporters in late 2004.
In a typical month, the firm handles about 30 to 40 traffic cases, which make up about 60% of the business.
The firm is now marketing itself beyond traffic citation defense. The fightyourcase.com site, touts the firm's capabilities in the area of general criminal defense law. It's growing too, as it recently hired three lawyers.
Expanding to Orlando and other areas around Tampa is an obvious next step, Haenel says. He's also thinking of launching a national lawyer referral service using 1-888-FIGHTIT.
Haenel knew from a young age that he would become a lawyer.
As a teenager, his idea of fun was anything and everything related to law enforcement. He consistently listened to the police broad band radio. On Thursday evenings he would go to the local municipal court to watch his best friend's father, a judge, preside over court.
"He almost came to court as much as I did," recalls Robert Messerman, the former Cherry Hill, N.J., municipal court judge who was Haenel's early inspiration. Haenel later worked closely with DUI prosecutors while interning at a New Jersey prosecutor's office in Camden County, one of the highest crime areas in the Northeast. In Buffalo, N.Y., he worked for a DUI defense attorney.
Why traffic cases? Why not the flashy front page defense cases?
Haenel cites good old-fashioned job security: "Everyone gets a traffic violation. It's like a haircut. Everyone gets a ticket. If you have a car and if you have a license, at some point in time you will likely get a citation."
How to change sides
David Haenel offers tips for those thinking of starting their own law practice after leaving a government position:
Never burn your bridges. Maintain a level of professionalism with your soon-to-be former employer;
Find an IT person to network your office, printer(s), and computers;
Time your leave in conjunction with the deadline for the local phone book ad cutoff.
Purchase a copy of J. Foonberg's How to Start and Build a Law Practice.
Bio
David Haenel
Practice: Finebloom & Haenel
Family: Haenel comes from a family of doctors. His father and brother are physicians and his sister is a dentist.
Schools: Widener Law School, Delaware, 1999; Master's of Law Degree (LLM) from SUNY Buffalo School of Law, 2000
What people don't know about him: He owns 122 domain names, including davidforjudge.com, an assortment of traffic school names paired with area codes, and fightyourbui.com for boating under the influence.
What does he do when he gets a ticket? He fights it, of course.
His most recent one was a speeding ticket he received last year in Baltimore, which he got while he and partner Darren Finebloom were on their way back to the airport after getting admitted into the bar for the United States Supreme Court.
"I told the guy that I liked his laser gun, got into a brief conversation with him and then ended up flying back to fight the ticket three months later," he says. "Unlike in Florida, you need to personally appear to fight a ticket in Maryland."
The fight was successful: He didn't have any points transferred back to his Florida license.
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