About RN Guardian
OUR STORY
It all started when Goyette & Associates, a labor and employment law firm with offices throughout California, began getting panicked phone calls from RNs seeking career advice because of defamatory complaints made by their peers. These RNs were facing BRN investigation and needed representation.
At first, the influx of calls from RNs came as somewhat of a shock. The Firm’s flagship practice primarily represented public employee associations and hadn’t worked with RNs before. But after talking to the RNs and hearing their stories, it began to make sense. BRN hearings are like real court hearings — there is a judge who makes a decision based on testimony. And nursing associations are like public employee associations — but nurses don’t get the legal protection that many unions provide.
The results are the same as well. A botched administrative hearing is just as severe for a registered nurse as it is for a police officer: the nurse or officer is ruined, their job is gone, their career is over, and they are not going to work in that field again. They have to go back to college or trade school and start over. When faced with such life-shattering possibilities, RNs were seeking out the best attorneys for the job. And Goyette & Associates’ phones kept ringing.
Not surprisingly, Goyette & Associates’ lawyers won every single time they went up against the BRN. The ecstatically grateful RNs were able to keep their licenses, keep doing the jobs they love and go on with their lives.
However, private representation is not cheap, everyone knows that. Even the simplest letter or phone call can cost thousands. Having a lawyer with the kind of track record of success that Goyette & Associates is known for attend a hearing could cost tens of thousands.
At the time, the Firm was on retainer with approximately 125 different associations in California. When an association has a law firm on retainer, the association picks up the tab when an individual member needs legal representation. The Goyette team soon realized this isn’t the case with RNs and their associations. Their associations don’t pick up the tab because the associations are advocacy groups; most don’t function like a union. RNs are forced to pay all legal expenses out-of-pocket — at a time when their career is in jeopardy and their pay potentially suspended.
The partners at Goyette & Associates began to think about the problem and talk about ways they could help RNs get affordable access to the legal services they so desperately needed. “What if there was a way that we could offer the benefit of a retainer relationship to individual nurses at a cost that would make sense to them?” they said.
The first step was creating an efficient, effective process for representing RNs. The Firm has 20 years of experience, and they had dealt with disciplinary cases that closely resembled BRN investigations. They knew the inner workings of an administrative hearing and soon found that defending RNs was second nature. And once they had the process down, they decided that it just didn’t seem fair to charge a full rate for something that came to the Firm so easily.
So they didn’t. They developed a plan that would provide a full range of legal services and license protection options to RNs at a price they could really afford. And RN Guardian was born.
