Monthly Archives: February 2013

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

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James Woolery is on the move again. We’ve never met, but I’m beginning to feel as if I know the guy.

Woolery first appeared in my June 3, 2010 post about a policy change at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. The Wall Street Journal featured the then-41-year-old Cravath partner in an article about the firm’s plan to allow lawyers in their 30s and 40s to “make a name for themselves” by taking the lead on client deals. Historically, the WSJ reported, Cravath had reserved that role for partners in their 50s.

Six months later, I wrote about Woolery’s departure from Cravath to become co-head of JP Morgan Chase’s North American mergers and acquisitions group. He told the New York Times that he’d developed a business development focus and the Chase opportunity allowed him to build on those skills. So much for practicing law.

Now, two years after joining Chase, Woolery has become the first firmwide deputy chair of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft — a new position apparently created specially for its prominent lateral hire. The Wall Street Journal suggested that the move “is a big personal bet for Mr. Woolery. He is jumping back to the legal industry when it is still struggling with a shortage of work, and he is leaving J.P.Morgan just as mergers are showing new signs of life.”

Regardless of the particular reasons for Woolery’s various moves, the contrast between where he started (Cravath) and where he has now ended (Cadwalader) is remarkable.

Cravath

Whatever else people may think of Cravath, it has an unrivaled reputation for attracting first-rate attorneys. It is also a partnership in the truest sense of that concept: A single tier with a lock-step compensation system that resists an undue emphasis on short-term thinking. The Cravath model promotes longer run values, such as institutional stability.

For example, a lateral hiring frenzy pervades big law, but it’s a relatively rare event at Cravath. The firm focuses on developing talent internally. Its attorneys work hard, run a challenging gauntlet to equity partnership, and reap rich rewards for success.

In May 2007, an American Lawyer interviewer asked Cravath’s then-presiding partner Evan R. Chesler whether partners would stick around if the firm made less money. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think there is more glue than just money.”

Cadwalader

Cravath’s ethos wouldn’t appeal to attorneys drawn to Cadwalader’s culture. In the mid-1990s, Cadwalader began moving aggressively toward what its new chairman Robert O. Link Jr. called a meritocracy. Others call it “eat-what-you-kill.”

In a February 2007 interview with the American Lawyer, Link expressed an attitude about firm culture that differed dramatically from Chesler’s. “Everyone should wake up in the morning and feel a little vulnerable,” he said.

Link meant it. In 1995, the 268-lawyer Cadwalader firm’s two-tier partnership had 76 equity partners, giving it a leverage ratio of three-and-a-half. By 2005, the firm had nearly doubled in size, but it had only 75 equity partners. Its leverage ratio of seven far exceeded that of all other Am Law 100 firms.

Cadwalader’s asset-backed structured finance practice fueled much of its growth. By 2007, it had 645 lawyers and a stunning leverage ratio of eight-and-a-half. But when the residential housing market cratered and took asset-back structured finance legal work with it, the firm’s fortunes slid badly.

By the end of 2012, Cadwalader had 435 lawyers — down more than 200 from five years earlier. Only 55 of them were equity partners — down 20 from 2007. The good news for the survivors was that by 2012, average equity partner profits had recovered almost completely to their 2007 all-time high of $2.7 million.

Differences that transcend metrics

As Cadwalader became smaller, Cravath maintained average partner profits ranging from $2.5 to $3.2 million, a leverage ratio of approximately four, and moderate growth from 412 to 476 attorneys. Even more to the point, it’s hard to imagine any circumstance short of dissolution that would cause Cravath to shed almost a third of its equity partners, as Cadwalader did from 2007 to 2012.

Back in May 2010, Woolery told the Wall Street Journal, “This is not your grandfather’s Cravath.” It’s not clear what that characterization of his former firm means or if it is correct, but offspring sometimes underestimate the value of a grandfather’s gifts. And offspring sometimes grow up to be grandparents themselves.

MORE LAW SCHOOL NON-REFORM

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Every week, there’s a new proposal to reform legal education. In a recent New York Times op-ed, John J. Farmer Jr., dean of the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, offered his suggestion: two-year apprenticeships.

Most deans operate in good faith and are genuinely concerned about the current state of the profession. In fact, a core element of dean Farmer’s idea is quite sound. Hands-on training was a good idea when Clarence Darrow studied under the tutelage of a practicing attorney, and it still is. The British placement system of training contracts has kept its lawyer bubble smaller than ours.

But Darrow began his apprenticeship after one year of classes. Farmer’s suggestion of a two-year residency following three years of law school misses the mark, as do his predictions about what it would accomplish.

Problems of mysterious origin

Farmer begins where he must: a collapsing job market; law school deception in creating the oversupply of lawyers; record tuition levels and student debt. But he ignores an important question: How did those things happen? The answer: a flawed law school business model.

Consider Farmer’s point about law school deception. For years, his school joined most others in reporting 90-plus percent employment rates for the newest graduates. In the 2008 ABA Official Law School Guide, Rutgers-Newark showed a 93.3 percent employment rate; as recently as the 2012 Official Guide, it was 91.3 percent.

Starting in 2012, the ABA required schools to reveal which graduates had long-term full-time jobs requiring a legal degree. Rutgers-Newark hit the overall average for all law schools: only 56 percent for the class of 2011.

As for lawyer oversupply, Rutgers-Newark has been a continuing contributor. According to the 2008 Official Guide, Rutgers-Newark matriculated 182 full-time students from 3,010 applicants. Since then, the number of applicants has declined dramatically, but the number of enrollments hasn’t.

The 2013 Official Guide reports that Rutgers-Newark received only 2,218 applicants to its full-time program. Yet the school still matriculated 174 new students. In other words, since 2007, the number of applicants has dropped by 800 (26 percent), but first-year enrollment has declined by only eight students (4 percent).

Farmer also laments record levels of tuition and resulting student debt. The 2008 Official Guide listed Rutgers-Newark’s full-time non-resident tuition and fees at $27,976; residents paid $19,623. Today, non-resident tuition at the school exceeds $37,000 — a 33 percent jump. Resident tuition has increased by almost 30 percent and now exceeds $25,000.

Non-solutions

Ignoring the role of law schools in creating the current crisis leads Farmer to a proposal that won’t solve it. He suggests scrapping the system whereby big firms “hire graduates from a few select schools, paying them exorbitantly.” In its place, he wants a residency program that would allow law firms “to hire more lawyers, at lower rates, and give talented graduates of less prestigious institutions a chance to shine.”

During his proposed two-year apprenticeships, students would work for minimal wages (“repaying their debts could be suspended, as it is for medical residents”). At the end of the period, firms “could then select whom to keep.” For the losers in that contest, job searches would start anew.

Not gonna happen

Apart from retaining the flawed law school business model that has taken the profession to its current state, Farmer’s plan requires a remarkable leap of faith in big law firm behavior. In particular, he hopes that firms would charge lower hourly rates for new associates and, as a result, hire more of them.

Unlike many law school deans, Farmer has extensive experience as a practicing lawyer. But when he tries to predict the behavior of big law firm leaders, he enters tricky terrain.

The prevailing law firm business model perverts the definition of productivity to mean total billable hours, rather than the efficiency with which lawyer inputs produce outputs for clients. The model emphasizes the metrics of near-term profits at the expense of longer-run values. It would view reducing associate labor costs as a godsend to its bottom line, not as a reason to spread the same amount of existing work among more lawyers.

Farmer doesn’t suggest reducing tuition, enrollment, or the duration of law school itself. Such steps would challenge the law school business model directly. That’s the real lesson of dean Farmer’s op-ed: Until deans revisit their roles in creating the current mess, their proposed solutions are likely to remain wanting.

Dean Farmer suggests, “Legal education has not so much failed the profession as mirrored it.” Actually, it’s done both.

BIG LAW’S 2012 PERFORMANCE — NUMBERS AND NUANCE

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Two recent reports sound a warning that most big law firm leaders should heed. One is the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report on the State of the Legal Profession. The other is Citi Private Bank’s Annual Law Firm Survey.

Lessons from Dewey & LeBoeuf

The Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Report is noteworthy because, at long last, thoughtful analysts are giving Dewey & LeBoeuf’s collapse the larger context that it deserves. For the most past, today’s managing partners have persuaded themselves that Dewey’s failure resulted from a unique confluence of management missteps that they themselves could never make. But most current leaders are making them.

In particular, Dewey wasn’t an outlier; it was among the elite of the Am Law 100. The firm embodied a culmination of prevailing big law firm trends that can—and will—produce future disasters. As the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report explains, those trends include raising the bar for promoting home-grown talent into equity partnerships while overpaying for lateral equity partner hires, increasing internal compensation spreads to create a subgroup of real players within equity partnerships, and ignoring the importance of morale and institutional loyalty to long-term stability.

Crunching the numbers

Meanwhile, Citi Private Bank’s annual full-year survey of big firms produced this upbeat headline: “Firms Posted a 4.3 Percent Rise in 2012 Profits.” But important underlying details are more troubling.

Although revenue and profits were up by 3.6 and 4.3 percent, respectively, overall demand at the 179 firms in the Citi sample grew by just 0.2 percent in 2012, expenses increased by 3.1 percent, and headcount grew more than demand. It’s a decidedly mixed bag of financial results.

In fact, Citi’s Dan DiPietro and Gretta Rusanow fear that the 2012 fourth quarter revenue surge saving many big firms “may not be sustainable.” For example, “survivorship bias” contributed to the final 2012 numbers. That is, Citi’s analysis removed Dewey & LeBoeuf’s revenue, demand, and equity partner figures from the 2011 base year because the firm disappeared in 2012. But most of Dewey’s revenue went to surviving firms, thereby artificially inflating the overall 2012 numbers. To some extent, it’s like comparing 2012’s apples to 2011’s oranges. Including Dewey’s 2011 numbers would have resulted in negative demand growth in 2012.

Citi also discussed the impact of accelerated year-end collections. They’re an annual event at most firms, but the expiring Bush-era tax cuts gave partners unique incentives to push clients for payment in December 2012. The report also mentioned a related possibility: firms may not have prepaid 2013 expenses.

A more insidious prospect goes unmentioned: some firms may have deferred expenses that were due and owing in December 2012. If the 2013 first quarter Citi report is surprisingly weak, look for a spike in expenses as a factor. Freedom to ignore generally accepted accounting principles in financial reporting gives law firms financial flexibility that can become dangerous.

Or maybe the numbers don’t matter

Transcending all of these possibilities is, perhaps, the simplest. Averages are often deceptive. For example, in a firm where the internal top-to-bottom equity partner income spread is ten-to-one or higher, average partner profits may reveal that some partners are players and most aren’t. But as an economic metric describing a typical partner in the firm, it’s useless.

Just as average profits can mask enormous differences within an equity partnership, so, too, overall average profits for the industry can hide the gap between successful firms and those struggling to survive. That means 2013 could be another year in which some Am Law 200 law firms will fail (or become absorbed in last-resort mergers).

Fragile winners

But even firms that regard themselves as financial winners in 2012 should beware. Many would do well to heed the Georgetown/Thomson Reuters caution about the loss of traditional partnership values that undermined Dewey & LeBouef. Considered from a different perspective, numbers that appear to demonstrate success can actually reveal lurking failure.

After all, as recently as the May 2011 list of the Am Law 100, Dewey was #23 in 2010 average equity partner profits ($1.8 million), #22 in gross revenue per lawyer ($910,000), and #19 on the Am Law profitability index with a profit margin of 36 percent. In February 2012, the firm made Am Law’s annual “most lateral hires” list for 2011, but no public report disclosed the firm’s staggering (but by no means unique) top-to-bottom equity partner income gap.

As a wise friend reminds me periodically, things are rarely as good as they seem — or as bad as they seem. He’s definitely right about the good part.

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

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It sure seems odd. On January 30, The New York Times reported this year’s dramatic decline in law school applications. A day later, a Wall Street Journal article described the many new schools that are in the works. Economists might call that “market disequilibrium.” More appropriate concepts might be incentivized idiocy and subsidized stupidity. U.S. News rankings incentivize the idiocy; taxpayer dollars subsidize the stupidity.

The WSJ article suggested that some administrators began implementing plans to add law schools “before the current drop [in applicants] became apparent.” However, the two schools in the article, Indiana Tech and the University of North Texas-Dallas College of Law, don’t have that excuse.

Indiana Tech didn’t complete its feasibility study of a proposed new law school until May 2011. The Texas legislature authorized the creation of the UNT-Dallas College of Law in 2009, as the Great Recession deepened. In the 2011-2012 state budget, it earmarked $5 million in funding. The school plans to start classes in 2014.

As for other new schools, what exactly wasn’t apparent when they came to life? Only obvious things that those responsible for creating the schools didn’t want to see.

Follow four numbers

First, from 2003 to 2008, the number of law school applicants dropped steadily — from 100,000 to 83,000. As the Great Recession made law school an attractive place to wait out a dismal economy, total applicants rose to 88,000 before resuming a downward trajectory, perhaps to as few as 54,000 for fall 2013 admission.

Second, in the face of an applicant pool that began shrinking ten years ago, first-year enrollment from 2003 to 2009 remained around 49,000. Refugees from the Great Recession pushed it over 51,000 in 2009 and 2010 before it settled back to 48,700 in 2011.

Third, when these 40,000+ students graduate, there will be full-time legal jobs for about half of them. But that’s not a new development, only a newly disclosed one. To game the U.S. News rankings, law schools have been fudging their employment numbers for years, and they know it.

Finally, at the end of 2003, there were 187 accredited law schools in the United States. Today, there are 201. Attempting to convey the magnitude of the current crisis, University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter told the Times that he expects “as many as 10 schools to close over the next decade.” But over the past ten years alone, the ABA has accredited 14.

What are the lessons?

First, a decline in applications alone doesn’t assure any change in the profession’s errant direction. The real-life experiment from 2003 to 2008 proves that for as long as the number of applicants exceeds the number of available places in law school, academic leaders who think they can make money on law students will continue to build schools.

Second, in an effort to reverse the downward trend in applications, some deans beat the bushes for additional students, even as the job market for their graduates shrinks. Case Western Reserve Law School dean Lawrence Mitchell’s recent op-ed in the NY Times is an example. Another example is an article that Professor Carla Pratt, associate dean of academic affairs at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, wrote last September for The National Law Journal: “Law School Is Still a Good Investment for African-Americans.”

Yet another example comes from the UNT-Dallas College of Law. According to the January 31 WSJ article, professor and associate dean for academic affairs Ellen S. Pryor, acknowledges that applications have plummeted, but “the fact that the nationwide numbers are down doesn’t dishearten us from thinking we’ll get really good students and fulfill our mission.”

And what might that mission be? According to the Journal, UNT-Dallas hopes to draw a different pool of applicants than other north Texas law schools. In other words, even undergraduates who never before gave serious thought to law school should prepare themselves for an onslaught of sales pitches.

Limited accountability

Here’s one reason for the profound disconnect: Administrators and deans maintain an unhealthy distance from the economic hardships that their worst decisions inflict on graduates. Federally-guaranteed student loans fuel a system that relieves law schools of financial accountability.

Imagine how the world might change if the government as guarantor had recourse to a student’s law school for that graduate’s subsequent loan default. In the absence of such a market solution, educational debt collection has become a growth industry as law schools avoid the messes they’ve made.

Welcome to The Lawyer Bubble.