About Us
Ward and Smith, P.A. is the successor to a practice founded in New Bern, North Carolina in 1895. Our Firm serves 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 each client's needs are unique. We strive to learn about those needs and to deliver a product tailored to meet them. When needed, we 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. 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 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 29 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' attorneys may call on colleagues 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 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.
Ward and Smith's commitment to provide exceptional client service is an ongoing professional goal for each member of our Firm. We achieve this objective by creating and maintaining unique attorney-client relationships. Our clients appreciate the advantage of having accessible attorneys and we encourage them to call whenever a legal question or concern arises. Our attorneys make themselves available, at work or at home, in or out of the office. We are a full-service law firm whose focus never strays from our core values of reliability and responsiveness.
Ward and Smith is committed to maintaining the latest in information technology 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 advanced systems in our legal and data 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 of 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 cost-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.