Two crafts, forty-five years each.
Keith A. Bennett has spent his working life doing two things at once — and it turns out they’re the same thing.
He was carrying computers into law offices in 1980.
In 1979 he opened a computer store in Huntington Beach. By 1980 he was carrying computers into law offices and setting them up under the desks — Century City and Wilshire, Encino while the Valley firms were still there, Irvine, and Santa Ana across from the courthouses.
Pulling the network. Then teaching the receptionist, the paralegals and the attorneys how to actually use it. WordPerfect, then Word. The billing. The pleading library, so nobody in the office ever retyped a paragraph that already existed down the hall. Then the phone systems. He introduced attorneys to email roughly a decade before anyone was using email.
Nobody ever asked him to redo the whole house on the first call.
For those same forty-five years he has been a builder. Custom homes. Hillside houses in concrete, steel and glass carved into granite above Laurel Canyon. Restaurant build-outs and wine cellars. Commercial and industrial shells. More than a thousand fire-resistant tile roofs, and a cool-roof company that coated millions of square feet, including Gulfstream’s Long Beach campus.
And whole-house makeovers — about two a year, for four decades. You take a house down to what works and spend a year rebuilding it into something that finally functions for the people living in it.
A law firm and a hillside are the same kind of problem.
Both are systems with a competent owner who gets exposed in unfamiliar territory, accumulates disconnected vendors, and suffers from decisions made without knowing what comes next.
The role is the same in both. See the whole system. Make the next decision understandable. Keep the owner in control. People buy trust before they buy professional services — and after forty-five years, that isn’t a marketing theory. It’s just what happened.
Intentionally small.
- Keith A. Bennett — senior strategist, and the person you’ll actually talk to.
- Pastor Jeremy — long-time creative and technical partner; design and websites, out of Michigan.
- Karen Francis — live answering, bilingual English and Spanish, for select law-firm systems.
Relationship-driven, month to month, no long lock-in, very few firms at a time.
Forty-five years is a long time to be wrong about something.
If you’d rather just talk, that’s the whole invitation. No pitch, and no contract waiting at the end of the call.
Keith A. Bennett · Law Sites Inc.
