Benjamin Farstad

My name is Benjamin Farstad, and I’m an attorney in the Harding Mazzotti litigation department. A lot of people think of attorneys as being cooped up in an office and doing paperwork all day, but in this line of work, you are on the go a lot and you’ve got clients scattered all across New York State. And yes, there is the paperwork aspect of it, but it’s rewarding to go and really deal with actual people every single day. I think I can relate to my clients. I like dealing with people from all walks of life because that’s kind of what life is all about. So, it’s nice to have clients that aren’t always attorneys, and they’re just normal folks that are unfortunately falling on hard times and need a little bit of assistance. The first thing that I do when I get a new litigation client is reach out to them, make sure that they understand what the litigation process entails. Let them know kind of an idea of what a timeline looks like, and make sure that if they have any questions, they have my direct point of contact, and they know that I’m available as a resource for them. I try to be empathetic to their situation. I want to be there as a listener first before I can kind of decide how I’m going to move forward with their case. The best wins are the ones where the clients are happy. If my client is willing to give us a review or they’re genuinely happy when we come to that point of settlement, those are the ones that stick out to me. The clients that are gracious enough to send other people to me, that I’ve built lasting relationships, that’s rewarding. I think my background impacts me because my mom is a legal guardian, so she is on the side of the law, where it requires a lot of sensitivity to the hard times that people have fallen on when they need your representation. Growing up in the area, growing up with a mom that does that kind of work, and understanding the community and what they need out of an attorney and as a representative to try and be a champion for them and help them get what they deserve when they’ve been wrongfully injured. I live up in Saratoga, so we always love to go to the track and enjoy some of the local restaurants, spend some time with family. I still like to play hockey in a men’s league locally. I like to ski. I love sports, so if I can watch live sports, I get down to MetLife and watch the Jets lose as well. I graduated from college, and I started here as an intern. And then I worked my way up to a law clerk. I worked here through law school. The partners were generous enough to pay for my bar prep. I bar-prepped right in one of the offices here, and I passed the bar, and I got offered a job to work in litigation with Vic, and absolutely was excited to do that. This has been my legal career as it started, and hopefully it will be the legal career that I finish in. There’s a lot of things that inspire me about this line of work. One of them is our leader is still in the trenches every single day. I’ve grown up in the area, so you see Vic Mazzotti and Paul Harding and Rosemarie on the billboards and in the commercials, but you come to work every single day, and they’re still here doing the work. They love what they do, and I think when you have people leading from the top like that, that genuinely care about every employee in the building and every client that walks through these doors, that’s a culture that permeates through everything, and it really shows in the work that we try to do.