The Firm, although it has had several different names over the years, began as Beins & Axelrod in 1980, co-founded by Hugh Beins and Jon Axelrod. Hugh began representing unions in 1960 when he was hired as the General Counsel for the Eastern Conference of Teamsters. Jon worked in the Appellate Division of the NLRB in the 1970s until he joined Hugh at the Eastern Conference in the mid-1970s.

In 2007, Justin Keating joined the Firm as shareholder after seven years as an in-house lawyer at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 2020, Rod Harrell joined us as part-time counsel. In 2025, Treyvon Jordan joined us as an Associate Attorney.

For many years now, the Firm has represented unions big and small in the public and private sectors. For our union clients, we help them organize new groups of workers, negotiate collective bargaining agreements (in both an “advising” role as well as lead negotiator), enforce their collective bargaining agreements at arbitration, and litigate for them in administrative agencies and state and federal courts. We represent employee benefit funds, individual employees and classes of employees in disputes with their employers, and plaintiffs in class actions against heartless corporations who care little about ordinary people. Rod and Treyvon, both veterans themselves, also work with veterans in making sure they are treated with the respect and given the benefits they deserve for serving our country.

The common thread of our work is that we will always take the side of the people on the bottom of the power imbalance. We will do everything we can to tip that scale back in favor of people who work for a living instead of for people who make their money by taking money out of one person’s pocket and skimming a little off before putting it in another person’s pocket. The other side might be a state or local government as a powerful and sometimes disrespectful employer, a big bank that thinks powerful shareholders deserve more respect than working families, or a big corporation that considers its workers to be just another “resource” instead of a human being who deserves respect, a voice on the job, and a safe workplace.