Robertson & Associates

Focus and practice areas

Robertson & Associates is a business law and litigation firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. The firm was founded in 1996 by Richard L. Robertson. Its lawyers appear in state and federal courts, in arbitration and before government agencies.

The client base is small and midsize businesses in Charlotte and the surrounding communities. The firm also represents construction companies across North Carolina. That gives the practice two shapes at once: a local business advisory role in Mecklenburg County, and a construction litigation role that reaches statewide.

Five subject areas appear on the home page: business law, commercial litigation, construction, commercial real estate and estate planning. In my opinion those five hang together well. A construction company that needs a contract drafted, a payment dispute pursued and an owner's succession plan written can do all three in one office.

Business and transactional work

The firm handles business formation, partnership matters, contracts and transactions. Employment matters and commercial disputes also fall inside the practice. This is the work that follows a company through its life: entity choice at the start, agreements with partners and vendors along the way, litigation when an agreement breaks down.

Business formation work in North Carolina usually runs through the Secretary of State. Articles of organization or incorporation get filed there, and the internal document (an operating agreement for an LLC, bylaws for a corporation) governs how owners share control and money. Disputes years later often turn on how carefully that internal document was written.

Construction

The firm's construction work covers contracts, bidding, bonding, payment disputes, mechanics liens and defect claims. That list tracks the sequence a construction dispute actually follows. A bid protest or a bonding question comes early. Payment and lien claims arrive during or after performance. Defect claims can surface long after the last invoice.

Mechanics lien practice in North Carolina runs on deadlines. A claim of lien on real property has to be filed within a set period after the last furnishing of labor or materials, and a lawsuit to enforce it follows on its own clock. Contractors who miss those windows lose the security interest and keep only a breach of contract claim. Firms that handle liens regularly tend to build calendaring around this, because the dates do the work.

Real estate and estate planning

Commercial real estate matters and disputes tied to construction and development sit in the same practice. That overlap is practical. A development dispute can involve a purchase agreement, a construction contract and a lien all at once, and one firm holding all three threads has fewer handoffs.

On the estate side, the firm handles wills, trusts, probate and succession planning. Succession planning is the piece that connects back to the business practice. A closely held company with two or three owners needs a buy-sell arrangement and a plan for what happens when an owner dies or leaves. Probate in North Carolina goes through the Clerk of Superior Court in the county where the decedent lived, and a business interest inside an estate can complicate that process considerably.

How the team is built

The site names nine attorneys with their titles. R. Lee Robertson, Jr. is managing partner. Richard L. Robertson, Susannah M. Barr and David C. Cordes are of counsel. Jacob A. Johnson, Harsh C. Shah, Skylar Etheridge, Ryan M. Hopfe and Jasmine L. Green are associates.

That structure puts three of counsel attorneys alongside five associates and one managing partner. Of counsel is a flexible title in US practice, and it commonly marks a senior lawyer with a continuing relationship to the firm outside the partnership track. Founders who step back from daily management often hold it.

Five associates in a firm this size is a substantial share of the roster. As a reviewer, I read that as a firm doing enough volume to keep several developing lawyers occupied across business, construction and estate matters.

Richard L. Robertson

Richard L. Robertson founded the firm and is now of counsel. He earned his J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1977. His listed practice areas are bankruptcy, commercial litigation, construction law, corporate law, creditors' rights and insurance defense.

He also served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. That role puts a lawyer in federal court regularly and early, handling matters on behalf of the United States.

His creditors' rights and bankruptcy listing is worth noting alongside the firm's construction focus. Construction payment disputes and contractor insolvency run into each other often. A general contractor that files for bankruptcy mid project leaves subcontractors, sureties and owners sorting out claims in two forums at once.

What the public record shows

The firm gives a founding year, a city, a named founder and a full attorney roster with titles. Those are checkable facts, and they are the ones a directory like this one can verify. The 1996 founding date puts the firm at roughly three decades in Charlotte.

Detailed biographies appear for the founding attorney. The other eight attorneys are listed with names and titles. Readers who want law schools, admission dates or individual case histories for those attorneys will want to ask the firm directly or check the North Carolina State Bar's public member directory, which lists admission dates and status for every licensed attorney in the state.

The firm describes its courtroom work as covering state courts, federal courts, arbitration and administrative agencies. Construction contracts frequently contain arbitration clauses, often incorporating American Arbitration Association construction rules, so a construction litigation practice that never touched arbitration would be unusual. The four forums the firm names match the work it describes.

Who this firm fits

The clearest match is a Charlotte area company with recurring legal needs across more than one area. An owner who needs an operating agreement, a vendor contract reviewed and a will drafted gets all of that in one place.

The second match is a construction company anywhere in North Carolina. The firm says it handles construction litigation statewide, and the practice list covers the full arc of construction disputes from bidding through defect claims. A contractor in Asheville or Wilmington with a lien deadline approaching is inside the stated service area.

Statewide construction litigation means real travel. North Carolina has 100 counties and three federal districts, and a lien enforcement action gets filed where the property sits. A firm making that claim is describing a willingness to appear in courthouses well outside Mecklenburg County.

Companies with disputes that cross into insolvency have a further reason to look here. The founding attorney's bankruptcy and creditors' rights background sits inside a firm that also handles construction payment claims, and those two areas meet often in practice.

Reading the listing

Robertson & Associates presents a defined scope. Business law, litigation, construction, commercial real estate and estate planning are the five areas, and the roster of nine attorneys is sized to cover them.

The geographic story is two layered: business clients concentrated in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, construction clients drawn from across North Carolina. Firms that keep a construction practice going statewide usually do so because the subject matter expertise travels better than general business work does.

As a reviewer, I find the useful signals here are the length of operation, the named leadership succession where the founder handed the firm to the current managing partner, and the consistency between the practice areas listed and the forums the firm says it appears in. The firm has operated in Charlotte since 1996.