Goldschmid, Silver & Spindel

Focus and practice areas

Goldschmid, Silver & Spindel concentrates on workers' compensation for injured workers in California. The firm operates from Los Angeles and takes clients across Los Angeles County and nearby cities. The State Bar of California has certified the firm in workers' compensation since 1979.

That certification is worth a moment of attention. California's State Bar runs a legal specialization program with defined requirements, and workers' compensation is one of the fields it covers. A 1979 date puts the firm's certified work well back into the era when the modern California comp system was taking its current shape.

The claim types the firm names go well past a simple slip on a factory floor. It handles environmental and occupational disease, emotional stress claims, cumulative trauma and wear and tear, brain injuries, catastrophic injuries, and the more common workplace injuries: back and neck injuries, construction accidents and machinery accidents. It also takes disability and wrongful death matters.

Work beyond the comp system

Some of the firm's practice sits outside the comp claim itself. It handles personal injury, employment law, city and county service-connected disability retirement, and Social Security Disability. Those categories often attach to the same underlying injury. A worker who cannot return to a physical job may have a comp claim, a disability retirement application and a Social Security Disability claim running at the same time, each with its own decision-maker and its own standard of proof.

Who the firm represents

The client base the firm describes splits along union and non-union lines, and across private and public employment. It names workers employed by the state, the county and surrounding cities. Among those public employees, it lists members of the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Public safety work carries its own comp rules in California. Certain conditions affecting police officers and firefighters, including some cardiac and cancer claims, carry statutory presumptions that shift the burden of proof onto the employer. Those presumptions have specific service-length and timing conditions attached. A firm that names all three of the county's large public safety employers as client groups is signaling familiarity with that corner of the code.

In my opinion, the mix of union and non-union clients matters more than it first appears. Union members often reach a firm through a labor representative and arrive with documentation already assembled. Non-union private sector workers usually arrive alone, sometimes after an employer or an insurance carrier has already denied something. Handling both means the firm has to work with well-prepared files and with files that barely exist.

How the team is built

Four attorneys are named: Vernon Goldschmid, Lawrence Silver, James Malkin and Suzanne Agatstein. Maria Ochoa works as a paralegal. Two of the four attorney surnames appear in the firm name.

Four lawyers puts this firm in the small-practice category, and that size has practical consequences in comp work. A claim can run for years through medical evaluations, hearings and settlement talks. In a small office, the attorney who takes the intake call is likely the attorney who reads the medical reports and appears at the hearing. Continuity of that kind is harder to hold in a larger operation with layered staffing.

Paralegal work carries real weight in workers' compensation. Claims turn on documents: medical records, wage statements, employer reports, benefit notices, and the deadline-bound filings that keep a claim alive. Naming a paralegal on the attorneys page suggests the firm treats that record-keeping function as part of the visible team.

Where the cases go

The firm's attorneys appear before the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board, the California Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court. Those three forums describe a full appellate path, and it helps to understand how they connect.

The route a contested claim takes

A disputed California comp claim starts at the local WCAB district office, where a workers' compensation judge hears evidence and issues a decision. A party unhappy with that decision can file a petition for reconsideration, which goes to the Appeals Board commissioners in San Francisco. If reconsideration is denied or the result still stands, the next step is a writ petition to the California Court of Appeals. Review at that level is discretionary, and the court can decline to hear the matter.

The California Supreme Court sits at the end of that chain, and it takes comp cases rarely. A firm naming all three levels is describing the range of forums where its attorneys have appeared. As a reviewer, I read that as a statement about the firm's willingness to carry a claim past the first adverse ruling, which is where many comp disputes actually get resolved.

What the record shows

Cases are accepted on a contingency fee basis. In California workers' compensation, attorney fees are set by the workers' compensation judge and typically come out of the recovery rather than from the injured worker directly. The firm applies the same contingency approach across the matters it takes.

The firm maintains a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Its website is organized around practice areas, with a separate page listing the attorneys and paralegal by name.

The website states more than 40 years of work in the field and dates the State Bar certification to 1979. It gives no founding year and no entity designation such as P.C. or LLP. Attorney names appear without individual biographies, law schools or admission years.

What a prospective client can verify from the firm's own material is the certification date, the four attorney names, the practice areas, the fee arrangement and the courts where its attorneys appear. In my opinion, that is a narrower set of published detail than many California firms of comparable age offer, and readers who want credentials for a specific attorney will need to check the State Bar's own licensee records. The certification itself is checkable there too, which is a useful property for a directory built on evidence.

The firm's geographic reach covers Los Angeles County and the cities around it. Its practice areas cluster around a single question: what happens after a worker is hurt on the job and the claim does not resolve on its own.