Despite all of the good they do, lawyers often get very little respect, which helps explain Jennifer Peters’ comments:

“Lawyers are good people, too,” says Peters, a partner with Otis, Coan & Peters LLC, one of this year’s Better Business Bureau Torch award recipients.

Considering the culture at her firm, it’s easy to see her point, starting with how the firm decides who it will represent.

It is the company’s belief that its clients represent the firm as much as the firm represents its clients.

Because of this, Fred Otis estimated that its turns down as many as 50 percent of the requests they receive for representation. Each prospective client undergoes a detailed screening to ensure the clients are just as ethical as the people of OCP.

The firm’s goal is ambitious: to be the finest law firm in Northern Colorado. But rather than try to achieve that by putting in the typical grueling workweek that many lawyers face, the attorneys at OCP are allowed to work no more than 40 hours a week.

In addition, they are required to put in 1,080 billable hours per year, about half as many hours as, say, a Denver attorney at a big firm might be