Pet set finds champion in attorney who handles only beastliest cases.

REACHING back, Sandra Toye plucks a rat from her long auburn hair.

"Rats mean so much to me," she said, stroking her pet rodent's head. "If I can prove rats are entitled to fights, can you imagine the impact on dogs, cats and horses?"

Toye, the 35-year-old principal of West L.A. law firm Toye & Associates LLC, is among the rare breed of private-practice attorneys whose business is limited to non-humans.

So far, the business is struggling. Even in Los Angeles, where there are professional services for some of the most unlikely clients, Toye has faced challenges in building a practice that handles estate planning, veterinary malpractice, landlord/tenant disputes or custody battles involving Fifi or Fido.

"For this year, I'm anticipating billings of $300,000, but whether we get that is a different question," Toye said, acknowledging she's had to re-finance her house and borrow money from credit cards to pay overhead; her husband helps, too. "It's all a personal investment."

One of her clients, George Jeffers, said he paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills involving the family's three-year-old border collie, Cherokee.

"Financially this is a stupid route to go down," said Jeffers. "The dog is not worth that. But our dogs are members of our family. They live in the house with us. We love the dog. Money wasn't an object."

Jeffers retained Toye in his effort to bring back Cherokee, who allegedly was stolen by a woman during a dog show. He said that the dispute, essentially a custody battle, ended happily with Cherokee's return.

"Her focus is a little bit different," said Dionne Marucchi, opposing counsel in another case Toye brought involving a landlord-tenant dispute. "It's almost like a custody case where she's thinking of what's best for the animal, the pets. It makes me have to shift my focus, as well, to see if I can come up with a solution."

Growing field

One time Toye was retained by an elderly woman cited for keeping too many cats--she trapped strays, spayed and neutered them, and released them. In another case, she negotiated a deal with a veterinarian to return a cat whose owner ran out of money to pay the medical bills. "The reason I'm in this business is to help animals," she said. "It was always animals first, law second."

In the past decade, about 25 U.S. law schools have added animal law to their list of courses, including the University of California, Los Angeles.

In that time, court decisions have expanded the rights of animals in, among other areas, estate planning. As of March, 23 states, including California, had enacted statutes pertaining to trusts for pets, while nine states had legislation pending, according to the Estate Planning for Pets Foundation in Phoenix.

"People recognize animals are not simply property but have some type of rights," said Kenneth Cunniff, director of the International Institute for Animal Law in Chicago. "Obviously, there's a wide discrepancy as to what kind of rights animals should have, but most people do believe you can't simply deal with animals as though they're objects."

Even so, Toye said one of her biggest challenges is to be taken seriously. "I used to have judges laugh at me," she said. "I didn't laugh back."

There are some practical problems when your clients are, well, animals. For openers, they're banned from courthouses and many office buildings. Toye has taken $2,150-per-month offices in decidedly non-fancy space on the second floor of a building within earshot of Santa Monica Boulevard traffic.

With six reasonably domesticated rats wandering across her desk, and Jake, the Lab-shepherd mix roaming from room to room carrying stuffed toys, Toye's office is far removed from the sober wood-and-leather recesses of a downtown law firm.

Since opening her practice in 1999, she has represented pets of all stripes, many displayed in photos tacked to the wall--dogs, cats, horses and rats, bunnies, guinea pigs, a monkey, a bobcat, a mountain lion and a raccoon.

Her love of animals dates to childhood, when she witnessed the birth of her first pet, a white toy poodle named TT. She also has raised birds, hamsters and lizards along the way.

By the age of seven, she wanted to be a veterinarian. But that meant having to watch animals die. It also required strong math skills, which she lacked. For a while after college, she drifted into the entertainment industry, working as a script supervisor.

On the set of the 1994 Tom Hanks film "Forrest Gump," however, her entertainment career came to a halt when two snakes were killed in an explosion during the filming of a Vietnam War scene. "When they brought the snakes out, I freaked out," she said. "But that inspired me."

In 1995, she enrolled at Southwestern Law School, where she founded an animal law society and peppered her professors with questions about the legal rights of animals. One of her biggest concerns: that animals have a trustee overseeing their inheritance in an estate plan.

"For me it was personal," she said. "The thought of leaving money to a friend--what if they didn't take care of a pet? That to me was very frightening."

To drum up business, she has attended pet expos and other animal-oriented events, carrying purses shaped like giraffes and leopards to draw attention. She continues to speak at events and advertise in the Pet Press, a local flier distributed at veterinary clinics and pet stores.

She said the firm gets five inquiries a week and handles 10 cases at any given time, most of which wind up in settlements or non-jury trials. Toye supports a staff that includes an office manager, a paralegal, two other attorneys, a part-time marketing and part-time accounting person.

Her hourly rate has risen to $275 from the $175 she charged when she started out. These days, she does not take cases on a contingency basis and insists on a $10,000 upfront fee that's returned when their bills are paid. Some clients are content to forfeit the $10,000 as bills exceed that cap.

Toye admits she has taken a few cases for free, which hasn't helped her financially. But she has no regrets.

"How can you get the value of an animal?" she said, holding up one of her pet rats. "Sabrina was $1.99 at Petco. She's intelligent, sweet and so funny. If someone were to harm her, I can't believe she's not worth more than $1.99."

PROFILE

Toye & Associates LLC

Year Founded: 1999

Core Business: Legal services for animals

Revenues in 2002: $69,000

Revenues in 2003: $80,000

Employees in 2002: 1

Employees in 2003: 4

Goal: To have four full-time attorneys, adequate support staff and her own office in five years

Driving Force: Continuing to provide excellent service and to market the firm through trade shows, newsletters and newspaper ads