ARE LAWYERS BECOMING HAPPIER?

Posted on September 16, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A recent scholarly study and the 2013 Am Law Midlevel Associates Survey together pose an intriguing question: Is the legal profession becoming happier? If so, that would be a welcome development.

Perhaps the answer is yes and I should take partial credit, at least for improved associate morale in some big firms. After all, for years I’ve been writing and speaking about the extent to which the profession has evolved in ways that undermine attorney well being, especially in large firms. Since the publication of my book, The Lawyer Bubble, many managing partners have invited me to address their partnership meetings on that subject. But before getting too carried away, let’s take a closer look.

No Buyer’s Remorse!

In “Buyers’ Remorse? An Empirical Assessment of the Desirability of a Lawyer Career,” Professors Ronit Dinovitzer (University of Toronto), Bryant Garth (University of California, Irvine – School of Law), and Joyce S. Sterling (University of Denver Strum College of Law) analyzed data from the After the JD project. It tracks about 4,500 lawyers from the class of 2000 who responded to questions in 2003, 2007, and 2012.

Among other things, the authors conclude that “the evidence of mass buyer’s remorse [over getting a legal degree] is thin at best.” (p. 3) I’m not convinced.

First, a new lawyer entering the market in 2000 has enjoyed better times for the profession than graduates of the last several years. That doesn’t render data from the class of 2000 meaningless, but a study based on the experience of those attorneys shouldn’t become a headline-grabber that unduly influences anyone considering a legal career today.

Second, the authors rely only on responses that attorneys provided in 2007. The answers they gave in 2012 are “currently being cleaned and readied for analysis” (p. 5), so the authors didn’t use them. What was the rush to get to print with 2007 data? Why not wait and use the 2012 results to see whether accelerating law firm trends since 2007 affected responses from even the comparatively lucky class of 2000.

(For more on those trends, including partner de-equitizations, salary reductions for non-equity partners, and the environment that has accompanied the accelerating drive to increase short-term profits, read Edwin Reeser’s excellent two-part article in the ABA Journal.)

More on the Data

In the end, After the JD is a useful source of information. But it’s an overstatement to argue, as Dinovitzer et al. assert, “the data from the AJD project are the best (and almost only) data available on the issues currently being debated.” (p. 5)

In fact, there have been dozens of studies on attorney satisfaction, including an October 2007 ABA survey in which six out of ten attorneys who have been practicing 10 years or more said they would not recommend a legal career to a young person. And that was prior to the Great Recession.

Now before defensive academics pull out their knives, let me state clearly that I’m not suggesting that the ABA’s online survey of 800 lawyers is somehow superior to the obviously more comprehensive After the JD project. It’s not. But contrary to the authors’ assertion, AJD is far from “the only data available on the issues currently being debated.”

For example, Professor Jerome A. Organ (University of St Thomas School of Law) recently published a compilation of 28 attorney surveys taken between 1984 and 2007. Rates of satisfied attorneys ranged from a low of 59 percent (South Carolina – 2008) to a high of 93 percent (Minnesota – 1987). The latest national study on Organ’s list (ABA/NALP – 2007) reported a satisfaction rate of 76 percent. (He excluded the ABA’s reported 55 percent satisfaction rate in 2007 because it “was not a random sample of attorneys.” n. 144.)

The Am Law Survey

Meanwhile, Am Law’s annual Midlevel Associates Survey of third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates reported record high levels of associate satisfaction. Are their lives improving?

Anecdotal evidence of another possibility comes from an observed shift in attitudes among students in my undergraduate and law classes over the past several years. Many members of the youngest generation of lawyers (and would-be lawyers) are so concerned about finding jobs that they are now equating satisfaction with getting and keeping one long enough to repay their staggering student loans. That might explain why the same Am Law survey found that only 10 percent of men and 6.5 percent of women saw themselves as equity partners at their current firms in five years.

Now What?

Even so, inquiries that I receive from law firm managing partners provide more anecdotal proof that some firms have decided to value associate morale. The question is whether firm leaders will have the courage to push positive change into the very heart of the prevailing big law firm business model.

On that front, the news is less encouraging. In March 2013, Forbes reported on a “Career Bliss” survey of 65,000 employees that ranked “law firm associate” first on the list of “Unhappiest Jobs in America.” Likewise, in a recent Altman Weil Flash Survey, 40 percent of managing partners reported that partner morale at their firms in 2013 was lower than at the beginning of 2008 (pre-recession).

The Bottom Line

In the end, Dinovitzer et al. seem encouraged that “the overall trend is that more than three-quarters of respondents, irrespective of debt, express extreme or moderate satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer.”

That’s supposed to be good news. But there are more than 1.2 million attorneys in the U.S.. Even a 75 to 80 percent satisfaction rate leaves more than 200,000 lawyers with what sure looks like buyer’s remorse.

The profession can do better than a “C.”

LATEST SYMPTOMS OF AN AILING PROFESSION

Posted on September 4, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Together, three recent stories capture much of what ails the legal profession: 1) law schools continue to produce way too many lawyers for the number of anticipated jobs requiring a JD degree; 2) future attorneys incur staggering debt for a three-year degree that can and should be obtainable in two; and 3) many senior partners in big law firms at the pinnacle of the profession have lost an appreciation for their good fortune and a sense of perspective that comes with it.

The End of Lawyers?

The first story reports a continuing drop in the number of law school applicants — more than 30 percent since 2010! Could this be the beginning of what one law professor has predicted will be an actual shortage of lawyers by 2016?

No.

Using 2010 as a baseline against which to measure the comparative decline in applications is misleading. The Great Recession produced a surge of 2009-2010 applicants seeking a three-year reprieve from an impossible job market. At that time, law school still looked like a safe bet, largely because deans could tout 93 percent employment rates without disclosing which of their graduates held jobs that were short-term, part-time, school-funded, or didn’t require a legal degree.

Another fact is more salient: Overall acceptance rates have increased dramatically. In 2003, about half of the 98,000 applicants were admitted. In 2012, law schools took 75 percent of the 68,000 applicants. Bottom line: prior to the Great Recession, first-year enrollment totaled about 49,000; in 2012, it was 44,500. That drop is certainly affecting some law schools. But the overall decline is not as dramatic as the hyperbolic headlines. If first-year enrollment ever falls below 30,000 and stays there for a few years, that will be newsworthy.

What Are Students Getting For Their Money?

Meanwhile, President Obama weighed in on the subject of eliminating the third year of law school. It’s been a great idea for a long time. Of course, the third year will survive the President’s criticism because it accounts for one-third of law school tuition revenues. Such a central component of the law school business model won’t die easily.

Some members of the legal academy defend the third year of formal legal education as necessary for increasingly complex times. That argument may prove too much. After the first year teaches prospective attorneys to think like lawyers and the second year covers basic substantive legal areas, the most relevant legal training occurs outside the classroom under the tutelage of practicing lawyers. Many attorneys develop specialties, but that doesn’t result from taking one or two advanced courses during the third year of law school.

Deans can pass blame for the enduring third year onto the ABA. It has long been a victim of regulatory capture by the institutions it’s supposed to be supervising for the well being of all attorneys and the profession. The vast majority of states require graduation from an ABA-accredited law school and the ABA’s rules insist on course work that requires three academic years to complete. That’s why the few schools that offer accelerated two-year JDs are simply cramming three years of credits into two calendar years.

Moreover, the accelerated programs rarely reduce the cost of law school. Most of the schools offering accelerated programs charge the same total tuition as their traditional three-year programs.

Meanwhile, At Big Firms…

A final story is developing over financial reports concerning the overall performance of big law firms in 2013: Revenues are flat; demand is down. Partner profits might not rise this year!

Where you stand depends on where you sit, I suppose. But what does it say about the most lucrative segment of the profession when law firm management consultants can induce panic at the prospect that average equity partner profits might remain steady or — perish the thought — drop to still-astounding six- or seven-figure levels that seemed remarkably good less than a decade ago?

I think it suggests that too many partners have forgotten why they went to law school in the first place. Very few became attorneys because they thought it would make them rich. But they’ve grown accustomed to that pleasant surprise.

Maybe the next generation will do better.

THE DANGEROUS MILLION-DOLLAR DISTRACTION

Posted on July 24, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A new study, renamed “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” is the latest effort to defend a troubled model of legal education. It’s especially disheartening because, before joining Seton Hall University School of Law in 2010, co-author Michael Simkovic was an associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in 2009-2010. At some level, he must be aware of the difficulties confronting so many young law graduates.

Nevertheless, Simkovic and co-author Frank McIntyre (Rutgers Business School) “reject the claim that law degrees are priced above their value” (p. 41) and “estimate the mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree as approximately $1,000,000 (p. 1).”

As the academic debate over data and methodology continues, some professors are already relying on the study to resist necessary change. That’s bad enough. But my concern is for the most vulnerable potential victims caught in the crosshairs of the “Million Dollar Law Degree” media headlines taken from the article’s original title: today’s prelaw students. If they rely on an incomplete understanding of the study’s limitations to reinforce their own confirmation bias in favor of pursuing a legal career primarily for financial reasons, they make a serious mistake.

The naysayers are wrong?

The study targets respected academics (including Professors Herwig Schlunk, Bill Henderson, Jim Chen, Brian Tamanaha, and Paul Campos), along with “scambloggers” and anyone else arguing that legal education has become too expensive while failing to respond to a transformation of the profession that is reducing the value of young lawyers in particular. Professors Campos and Tamanaha have begun responses that are continuing. [UPDATE: Tamanaha’s latest is here.] Professor Brian Leiter’s blog has become the vehicle for Simkovic’s answers.

One obvious problem with touting the $1 million average is that, for the bimodal distribution of lawyer incomes, any average is meaningless. Professor Stephen Diamond offered a rebuttal to Campos that Simkovic endorsed, calculating the net lifetime premium at the median (midpoint) to be $330,000 over a 40-year career. That might be closer to reality. But a degree that returns, at most, a lifetime average of $687 a month in added value for half of the people who get it isn’t much of an attention-getter. As noted below, even that number depends on some questionable assumptions and, at the 25th percentile, the economic prospects are far bleaker.

Causation

In the haze of statistical jargon and the illusory objectivity of numbers, it’s tempting to forget a fundamental point: statisticians investigate correlations. Even sophisticated regression analysis can’t prove causation. Every morning, the rooster crows when the sun rises. After isolating all observable variables, that correlation may be nearly perfect, but the crowing of the rooster still doesn’t cause the sun to rise.

Statistical inference can be a useful tool. But it can’t bridge the many leaps of faith involved in taking a non-random sample of 1,382 JD-degree holders — the most recent of whom graduated in 2008 (before the Great Recession) and 40 percent of whom have jobs that don’t require a JD — and concluding that it should guide the future of legal education in a 1.5 million-member profession. (p. 13 and n. 31)

Caveats

Simkovic and McIntyre provide necessary caveats throughout their analysis, but potential prelaw students (and their parents) aren’t likely to focus on them. For example, with respect to JD-degree holders with jobs that don’t require a JD, they “suggest” causation between the degree and lifetime income premiums, but admit they can’t prove it. (p. 25)

Likewise, they use recessions in the late 1990s and early 2000s as proxies for the impact of the Great Recession on current law graduates (compared to bachelor’s degree holders) (p. 32), minimizing the importance of recent seismic shifts in the legal profession and the impact on students graduating after 2008. (Simkovic graduated in 2007.)

This brings to mind the joke about a law professor who offers his rescue plan to others stranded on a deserted island: “First, assume we have a boat…” The study finesses that issue with this qualification: “[P]ast performance does not guarantee future returns. The return to a law degree in 2020 can only be known in 2020.” (p. 38)

Similarly, the results assume: 1) total tuition expense of $90,000 (presumably including the present value cost of law school loan interest repayments; otherwise, that number is too low and the resulting calculated premium too high); 2) student earnings during law school of $24,000; 3) graduation from law school at age 25 (no break after college); and 4) employment that continues to age 65. (pp. 39-41) More pessimistic assumptions would reduce the study’s calculated premiums at all income levels. At some point below even the Simkovic-McIntyre 25th percentile, there’s no lifetime premium for a JD.

Conclusions

After a long list of their study’s “important limitations” — including my personal favorite, the inability to “determine the earnings premium associated with attending any specific law school” — the authors conclude: “In sum, a law degree is often a good investment.” (p. 50) I agree. The more important inquiry is: When isn’t it?

In his Simkovic-endorsed defense of the study, Professor Diamond offers a basic management principle: any positive net present value means the project should be a go. But attending law school isn’t an aggregate “project.” It’s an individual undertaking for each student. After they graduate, half of them will remain below the median income level — some of them far below it.

The authors dismiss Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections (pp. 6-7), but it’s difficult to ignore current reality. In 2012 alone, law schools graduated 46,000 new attorneys. For that class, nine months out only 10 percent of law schools (20 out of 200) had long-term full-time JD-required job placement rates exceeding 75 percent. The overall JD-job placement average for all law schools was 56 percent.

Some of the remaining 44 percent will do other things because they have no realistic opportunity for legal careers. Financially, it could even turn out okay for a lot of them. (In that respect, you have to admire the boldness of the authors’ footnote 8, citing the percentage of Senators and CEOs with JDs.)

But with better information about their actual prospects as practicing attorneys, how many would have skipped their three-year investments in a JD and taken the alternative path at the outset? That’s the question that the Simkovic/McIntyre study doesn’t pose and that every prospective law student should consider.

More elephants in the room

Notwithstanding the economic benefits of a JD that many graduates certainly enjoy, attorney career dissatisfaction remains pervasive, even among the “winners” who land the most lucrative big firm jobs. That leads to the most important point of all. Anyone desiring to become an attorney shouldn’t do it for the money. Even the Simkovic/Mcntyre study with its many questionable assumptions proves that for thousands of graduates every year the money will never be there.

But the authors are undoubtedly correct about one thing: “The data suggests [sic] that law school loans are profitable for the federal government.” (p. 46) Law schools like them, too.

It doesn’t take a multiple regression analysis to see the problems confronting the legal profession — but it can be used to obscure them.

THE TRUE COST OF THE WEIL LAYOFFS

Posted on June 26, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

The Wall Street Journal describes the layoffs of 60 lawyers and 110 staff as “the starkest sign yet that the legal industry continues to struggle after the recession.” But who, exactly, is struggling?

Not the owners of the business. The overall average profits for equity partners in the Am Law 100 reached record levels in 2012. Even during the darkest days of the Great Recession in 2008, PPP for that group remained comfortably above $1.2 million before resuming the climb toward almost $1.5 million last year.

Not equity partners at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who earned a reported average PPP of $2.2 million in 2012, according the the American Lawyer.

So Who Suffers?

One group of victims consists of 60 young people who had done everything right until everything went wrong for them on June 24. They’re intelligent, ambitious, and hard-working. Exemplary performance in high school earned them places in good colleges where they graduated at the top of their classes. They attended excellent law schools and excelled, even as the competition got tougher.

All of those accomplishments landed them great jobs. In the midst of a dismal legal job market, they went to work at one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms. Making more than $160,000 a year, many believed that soon they might throw off the yoke of six-figure student loan debt.

Now, they’re unemployed.

Another group of victims consists of 110 staffers who also got the boot. According to the NY Times, approximately half of them were secretaries. These behind-the-scenes workers often go unappreciated by lawyers who mistakenly take all of the credit for their own success.

A third group is a reported 10 percent of partners, many of whom who will suffer compensation cuts of “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to the NY Times.

“It’s All About the Future”

Announcing the layoffs, executive partner Barry Wolf described the move as “about the future of the firm and strategically positioning us for the next five years.” But layoffs aren’t about weeding out associates who don’t measure up to the rigorous quality standards necessary for equity partnerships. They’re about matching supply (of associates) with demand (for legal work) according to undisclosed criteria.

In fact, it seems a bit strange to talk about a firm positioning itself for the future while simultaneously dropping a morale bomb on its associates (and some partners) during the height of the summer program. The best and the brightest young prospects are working in big firms where luring that talent into the firms is a top priority. Bad public relations from a high-profile layoff can have a chilling effect that outlasts a single news cycle.

And what is that future going to look like? Will Weil be hiring any new associates over the next 12 months? Or 18 months? Or even 24 months? If so, I know 60 candidates with big firm experience (at Weil) who may be interested.

There is no shortage of current students who will continue to seek high-paying jobs at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. But what if negative publicity dissuades those few with the rare qualities necessary to become superstar partners from even signing up for on-campus interviews? By its very nature, such longer-run damage is impossible to know, much less measure.

Big Law’s Cheerleaders Applaud the Move

Law firm management consultants applauded Weil’s move. That’s not surprising because they have been central players in the profession’s transformation to just another business. They consistently endorse businesslike steps to maximize short-term profits. They expect other firms to follow Weil’s lead, and perhaps some will. Law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser said, “Weil is a bellwether firm and this will be a real wake up call.”

The etymology of bellwether may be relevant. In the mid-15th century, a bell was hung on a wether, a castrated ram that led a domesticated flock. In that way, the noise from the bellwether made it possible to hear the flock coming before anyone saw it.

In an informal Am Law survey, other firm leaders have distanced themselves from Weil. Before following that lead ram, perhaps they’re giving some thought to where it is going.

MY NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED

Posted on June 25, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Today, the Times is running my op-ed ed, “Big Law’s Troubling Trajectory.” Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/opinion/big-laws-troubling-trajectory.html?hp&_r=0

THREE EMBARRASSING DATA POINTS

Posted on April 17, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Three recently released numbers tell an unhappy tale of what ails the legal profession in particular and society in general. Specifically, those data points reveal profound intergenerational antagonisms that are getting worse.

Dismal job prospects persist

First, the ABA reports that only 56 percent of law school graduates in the class of 2012 secured full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree. The good news is that this result is no worse than last year’s. The bad news is the number of 2012 law graduates reached an all-time record high — more than 46,000. The even worse news is that the graduating class of 2013 is expected to be even bigger.

Sure, the number of students taking the LSAT has trended downward. So has the number of law school applicants. But students seeking to attend law school still outnumber the available places. Meanwhile, the number of attorneys working in big law firms has not yet returned to pre-recession levels of 2007. If, as many hope, the market for attorneys is moving toward an equilibrium between supply and demand, it has a long way to go.

Law school for all the wrong reasons

A second data point is even more distressing. According to a survey that test-prep company Kaplan Inc. conducted, 43 percent of pre-law students plan to use their degrees to find jobs in the business world, rather than in the legal industry. Even more poignantly, 42 percent said they would attend business school instead of law school, were they not already “set to go to law school.”

I don’t know what “set to go” means to these individuals, but if they want to go into business, first spending more than $100,000 and three years of their lives on a legal degree makes no sense. That’s especially true in light of another survey result: Only 5 percent said they were pursuing a career primarily for the money; 71 percent said they were “motivated by pursuing a career they are passionate about.”

Maybe these conflicted pre-law students are confused by the chorus of law school deans now writing regularly that a legal degree is a valuable vehicle to other pursuits. Let’s hope not. Many deans are simply trying to drum up student demand for their schools in the face of declining applicant pools.

Follow the money

The third data point relates to the money that fuels this dysfunctional system: federal loan dollars that are disconnected from law school accountability for student outcomes. Recently, the New York Times reported that on July 1, many student loan rates were set to double — from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

Young law school graduates are among the unenviable one-percenters in this group because 85 percent of them hold, on average, more than $100,000 in debt (compared to the overall average of $27,000 for all students). Like all other educational loans, those debts survive a bankruptcy filing.

In the current economic environment, an investor would search in vain for a guaranteed 6.8 percent return and virtually no risk. According to one estimate cited in the Times article, the federal government makes 36 cents on every student loan dollar it puts out.

Kids as profit centers

Ironically, those who favor raising the current 3.4 percent interest rate on many federal student loans to 6.8 percent are the same people who express concerns that growing federal deficits will saddle the next generation. The reality is that we already treat that generation as a profit center. For too many people, there’s money to be made in sustaining the lawyer bubble.

Until it bursts.

SOMEBODY’S CHILD

Posted on March 20, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Nine years ago, Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Now he wants Congress to repeal the provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act that deny federal recognition to such marriages. Apparently, his reversal on this issue began two years ago when his college freshman son told Portman and his wife that he was gay.

Plenty of prominent national figures have similarly changed their views. The tide of history seems overwhelming, even to conservative commentator George Will. Others can debate whether Portman and those who have announced newly acquired positions favoring gay rights are courageous, hypocrites, opportunists, or something else.

For me, the more important point is that his own child’s connection to the issue caused Portman to think differently about it. Applied to lawyers, the question become simple:

What if the profession’s influential players treated the young people pursuing a legal career as their own children?

Portman’s explanation

In 2011, Portman knew that his son was gay when 100 law graduates walked out of his commencement address at the University of Michigan.

“But you know,” he told CNN recently, “what happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.”

His key phrases are pregnant with larger implications: “[W]hat happened to me is really personal….I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue.”

Start with law school deans

As the lawyer bubble grew over the past decade, some deans and university administrators might have behaved differently if a “really personal” dimension required them to think “a lot” about their approaches. Perhaps they would have jettisoned a myopic focus on maximizing their law school rankings and revenues.

At a minimum, most deans probably would have disclosed earlier than 2012 that fewer than half of recent graduates had long-term full-time jobs requiring a legal degree. It seems unlikely that, year after year, they would have told their own kids that those employment rates exceeded 90 percent. Perhaps, too, deans would have resisted rather than embraced skyrocketing tuition increases that have produced six-figure non-dischargeable educational debt for 85 percent of today’s youngest attorneys.

Then consider big firm senior partners

At the economic pinnacle of the profession, big firms have become a particular source of not only attorney wealth, but also career dissatisfaction. In substantial part, both phenomena happened — and continue to happen — because managing partners have obsessed over short-term metrics aimed at maximizing current year profits and mindless growth.

For example, the billable hour is the bane of every lawyer’s (and most clients’) existence, but it’s lucrative for equity partners. If senior partners found themselves pushing their own kids to increase their hours as a way to boost those partners’ already astonishing profits, maybe they’d rethink the worst consequences of a destructive regime.

Similarly, the average attorney-to-equity partner leverage ratio for the Am Law 100 has doubled since 1985 (from 1.75 to 3.5). Perhaps managing partners wouldn’t have been so quick to pull up the ladder on lawyers who sat at their Thanksgiving tables every year, alongside those managing partners’ grandchildren who accompanied them. Not every young associate in a big firm should advance to equity partner. But offering a 5 to 10 percent chance of success following 7 to 12 years of hard work isn’t a motivator. It invites new attorneys to prepare for failure.

Finally, compared to the stability of a functional family, the current big law firm lateral partner hiring frenzy adopts the equivalent of periodic divorce as a cultural norm. Pursued as a growth strategy, it destroys institutional continuity, cohesion, community, and morale. Ironically, according to Professor William Henderson’s recent American Lawyer article “Playing Not to Lose,” it offers little or no net economic value in return.

Adopting a family outlook or a parental perspective isn’t a foolproof cure for what ails the legal profession. Indeed, running law schools and big firms according to the Lannister family’s values (“The Game of Thrones”) — or those of Don Corleone’s (“The Godfather”) — might not change things very much at all.

It’s also worth remembering that Oedipus was somebody’s child, too.

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

Posted on February 27, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

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.

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

Posted on February 6, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

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.

BANKRUPTCY AND BILLABLES

Posted on January 30, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Let’s replace a recent Am Law Daily headline — “Judge Slashes Fees in Dewey Bankruptcy” — with this: “Golden Age for Bankruptcy Professionals Continues.”

In bankruptcy proceedings, lawyers get paid ahead of everyone else. If they didn’t, insolvent debtors would go without representation. But that doesn’t explain why high-profile bankruptcies have become increasingly lucrative for lawyers. An absence of accountability does.

Professional compensation in bankruptcy matters comes from a dying entity’s estate. As the client disappears, so does close scrutiny of its legal bills. In its place, the United States Trustee reviews bankruptcy fee petitions, as does the supervising judge who eventually approves them. But both offices have limited capabilities and a restrictive mandate.

Low-hanging fruit

The limited capabilities arise from an understandable reluctance to second-guess lawyers’ strategies and, more importantly, the deployment of manpower to execute them. As a result, post-facto review of fee petitions usually focuses on obvious abuses.

For example, at the recent Dewey & LeBoeuf fee hearing, Judge Martin Glenn criticized $550 per night stays at the Waldorf-Astoria, private car expenses for driving around Manhattan, and excessively vague time entries. But the sanctions were minimal. According to the article, the court reduced a restructuring expert’s $250,000 request by “$4,455 in fees and $9,175 in expenses in addition to the amount Glenn axed [$4,400] during the hearing.”

Dewey’s lead bankruptcy attorney, Al Togut, wasn’t in court for a tongue-lashing over certain of his firm’s “excessively vague time entries” and “a page of expenses related to car rides,” according to the Am Law Daily. But at the end of the day, Togut, Segal & Segal’s $4.7 million bill for five months of work emerged largely unscathed, save for “$57,139 in fee cuts and $1,378 in expense cuts after consultation with the U.S. Trustee’s office, which had objections to several of the fee requests.”

The real money

The real story isn’t unique to Dewey’s professionals. In fact, small boutique firms such as Togut’s probably conduct their cases more efficiently than big firms that can throw armies of bodies at any problem. But all such attorneys benefit from extraordinarily high hourly rates that result from the absence of a competitive market and the perverse incentives of a billable hour regime.

That’s where the restrictive legal standard for approval enters the picture. In particular, the fees sought must be reasonable for the services rendered. However, law firms in the select club of prominent bankruptcy practitioners use publicly available information, including other firms’ fee petitions, to set hourly rates for their own personnel. Voila! The relative uniformity of such rates makes them “reasonable” — including the $700 an hour associate and the $300 an hour legal assistant.

The key players in this tautological circle don’t compete on hourly rates. What economists call conscious parallelism is far more lucrative for them. Because there’s no paying client searching for better value in response to rising legal costs, that potential market-driven constraint disappears. When Weil Gotshal submitted a $430 million fee petition for the Lehman bankruptcy, it listed 40 partners with hourly rates of $1,000 and some senior associates at $800 to $900 an hour.

The market gone awry

Defenders argue that complicated restructuring matters require talent and skill comparable to trying a big case or guiding a large transaction. After all, in 1978 Congress specifically made that determination in adopting a new compensation standard for bankruptcy lawyers. Today, they say, the market sets everybody’s rates. That position would be more compelling if hourly rates for bankruptcy attorneys were the result of a well-functioning market, but they aren’t.

If big law firms already competed on price in bankruptcy cases, they wouldn’t fear the transparency that the U.S. Trustee proposed last summer. The Trustee wanted firms to disclose whether they use a differential fee schedule — charging one rate for attorneys working on bankruptcy cases and a lower rate for the same attorneys working on other matters. More than 100 big firms united in strenuous opposition to that idea.

It’s easy to see why they objected. Especially in recent years, paying clients have demanded discounts and alternative fee arrangements to reduce legal costs. In bankruptcy, it’s not happening. Where else can firms charge more than $400 an hour for first-year associates, which Weil Gotshal sought for many such newbies in the Lehman case?

Add incentives for inefficiency and abuse that accompany the billable hour regime generally and the consequences become even more ironic: one of the most lucrative pockets of the profession reaps outsized rewards from the carcasses of distressed enterprises (and those enterprises’ creditors).

The entire system is uniquely vulnerable to creative innovation. Someday, it will arrive. But then again, for those currently reaping the greatest rewards, someday always seems to be somebody else’s problem.

TWO YEARS TO WHAT?

Posted on January 23, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

It’s no panacea. It may not even be a good idea. But in a recent New York Times op-ed, Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez and NYU law professor Samuel Estreicher endorsed a proposal allowing students to sit for the New York bar exam after only two years of law school:

“[I]t could make law school far more accessible to low-income students, help the next generation of law students avoid a heavy burden of debt and lead to improvements in legal education across the United States.”

The state’s top judge told a gathering of “legal educators, practitioners and judges that the concept deserves serious study,” according to the National Law Journal.

Sorting out the facts

If the New York proposal is adopted, what aspects of legal education might change? No one really knows, but the answer may be: less than some people think. That alone doesn’t make it a bad idea, but it could produce unintended consequences, too.

Most students who leave law school after two years will still have staggering debt. The average private law school graduate incurs $125,000 in loans; for public schools, it’s $75,000. Lopping off one-third would help, but it would still leave graduates with significant five-figure burdens.

No degrees

Unfortunately, the current discussion isn’t about eliminating the third year altogether and awarding JD degrees after two years, although it should be. ABA accreditation requirements block that definitive innovation. So do most law schools because many of them couldn’t survive the resulting loss of third-year tuition revenues.

Would a student who has already sunk $100,000 into two years of legal education decide that passing the bar alone was sufficient reward for that investment? Only if the value of the degree itself was worth less than the cost of a third year to get it.

Improving the third year

Finally, even assuming that many students availed themselves of the two-year option, how would most deans respond? In their op-ed, Rodriguez and Estreicher suggest that schools might improve third-year curriculum so that students would stay. But couldn’t schools do that now? Only a handful do.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rodriguez and Estreicher implicitly make the real point: only the threat of losing significant third-year tuition revenues will dramatically change most deans’ behavior. Deans may say that they’re in the business of trying to get students through law school economically, but when they have opportunities to act accordingly, few seem to make the effort. That’s because they’re actually in the business of maximizing their schools’ short-term metrics, including revenues and U.S. News rankings.

The decades-long explosion in tuition costs is one example. Another one appears in the Times op-ed, where Dean Rodriguez identifies his school’s “accelerated program that lets students pursue a three-year course of study in two years, allowing them to take the bar and enter the job market a year earlier.”

Rodriguez doesn’t mention that rushing through in two calendar years (thanks to summer classes and course overloads) won’t save students a penny on their total tuition expense. It’s two years for the price of three because, the school’s website observes, “The Law School prices tuitions based on the degree pursued rather than the length of enrollment.”

In fairness to Dean Rodriquez, he inherited the accelerated JD program and its pricing model from his predecessor, David Van Zandt. Among the program’s stated — and more dubious — goals has been to attract students who otherwise might not have gone to law school at all. Just what the profession has needed, right?

Taking chances with other people’s lives

Given their business models, many law schools seem likely to counteract any loss of third-year tuition revenues with larger entering classes. After all, that adjustment requires less work than improving curriculum, and total applicants overall still exceed the number of available spaces. Moreover, if the two-year option became popular, lowering the price of a legal education by one-third should increase demand, although the profession doesn’t need that, either.

What’s the correct approach to all of these unknown possibilities? According to the NLJ, Verizon’s general counsel Randall Milch urged throwing caution to the wind: “Analysis paralysis is our worst enemy here. If we are going to overanalyze, we’re never going to figure this out. In my opinion, we have to move and see what happens.”

There’s nothing quite like observing a real-life experiment on someone else.

THE LAWYER BUBBLE

Posted on December 5, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Case Western Reserve Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell’s recent op-ed in the New York Times proves that, like many law school deans, he is living in a bubble. Indeed, the views he expresses are one reason that I wrote THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis, which Basic Books will publish in April 2013. (Another reason is the troubling transformation of most big law firms, but that’s for another day.)

Mitchell’s spirited defense in “Law School Is Worth the Money” concludes that the “overwrought atmosphere has created irrationalities that prevent talented students from realizing their ambitions.” Apparently, he thinks everyone should just calm down, ignore facts, and keep pushing naive undergraduates into law schools, without regard to what will happen to them thereafter. He’s wrong.

Employment

Mitchell argues that a legal career is no worse choice than any other because the job market is bad in many industries. He notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects growth in the number of lawyers’ jobs from 2010 to 2020 at 10 percent — about as fast as the average for all occupations.

Here’s the thing: that 10 percent growth is for the entire ten years from 2010 to 2020 — a total net increase in the number of lawyer jobs of 73,600. And that number is down from a 2008 BLS estimate of 98,500. As 44,000 new law graduates hit the market each year, law schools are pumping out enough new attorneys for a decade every two years.

Other studies factoring in attrition suggest that, given the mismatch between supply and demand, there might be law jobs for about half of all graduates over the next 10 years. Case Western Reserve, where Mitchell is dean, is typical of mid-range law schools: it’s a fine institution, but according to the ABA, nine months after graduation, only 94 of the 201-member class of 2011 had full-time long-term job requiring bar passage.

Excessive tuition

With respect to the cost of a legal education, Mitchell says that “one report shows that tuition at private law schools has increased 160 percent from 1985 to 2011.” He doesn’t identify his source, but according to the ABA, median private law school tuition in 1985 was $7,385. In 2011, it was $39,496 — a more than 400 percent increase. The rate of increase for resident public law school tuition was far greater. Assuming that he’s adjusting for constant dollars, that’s still a whopping increase.

Then Mitchell compares legal education with medical schools where, even by his calculations, tuition has increased less (63 percent since 1985). But he excuses law school excesses by arguing that medical schools began the period with average tuition four times higher. That’s a false equivalence.

It should cost far less to train a lawyer than a doctor — as it did in 1985. But today it doesn’t. Why not? Because law schools have become cash cows, returning as much as 30 percent of tuition revenues to their universities. Moreover, pandering to U.S. News ranking criteria encourages law school expenditures without regard to value added. Federally guaranteed student loans fuel the system in ways that relieve law schools from meaningful accountability as they glut the market.

Debt

Mitchell dismisses the fact that average law school debt exceeds $125,000 with the cavalier assertion that “the average lawyer’s salary exceeds that number. You’d consider a home mortgage at that ratio to be pretty sweet.” He notes that attorneys’ average starting salaries have increased 125 percent since 1985.

Unfortunately, the average includes only those who actually have lawyer jobs, and it doesn’t consider the fact that, as Above the Law’s Elie Mystal emphasizes often, the average masks the bimodal distribution of attorney income. Thanks to the skewing effect of big law firm compensation (where only 15 percent of lawyers practice), most lawyers earn far less than the industry average. Moreover, median starting salaries for new attorneys have been dropping like a rock — from $72,000 to $60,000 since 2009. Meanwhile, law school tuition keeps going the other way.

Mitchell’s real complaint is probably that prospective law students are finally beginning to see the legal world more clearly and, at long last, the results may be showing up in reduced applications to schools below the top tier. But he need not worry because ongoing market distortions make equilibrium far, far away. In 2012, almost 70,000 prospective lawyers applied for almost 50,000 law school spots — even though there may be legal jobs for only half of them.

Armed with complete information about the challenges and rewards of a legal career, the best and the brightest future lawyers will still enter the profession. They’ll incur six-figure debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy because they’ll conclude that the investment is worth the risk — but they’ll consider the risk. Making an informed decision requires them to separate facts from magical thinking. For that, they’re on their own because, as Dean Mitchell reveals, most deans don’t — or won’t.

BONUS TIME – 2012

Posted on November 28, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

It’s always interesting when two respected legal writers approach the same story in different ways. That happened in the coverage of recently announced associate bonuses.

Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal penned an article in the November 27 print edition of the paper that ran under this headline:

“Cravath Sends Cheer — Law Firm Lifts Bonuses for Some Associates as Much as 60%”

As always, Jones accurately reports what is true, namely, that Cravath, Swaine & Moore led this year’s associate bonus announcements with an increase over last year’s base bonus levels. Five paragraphs in, he acknowledges that this significant bump still leaves associates well below the 2007 pay scale. The highest associate bonuses this year are $60,000, compared to $110,000 for combined regular and special bonuses in 2007.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times…

On the same day that Ashby Jones’s article ran in the WSJ, Peter Lattman at the New York Times was a bit more circumspect. In that paper’s print edition, the bold line that ran in the middle of the story reads:

“[Cravath’s] year-end awards set the bar for others, and the payouts are up a bit in 2012.”

Like Jones, Lattman observes that base bonus amounts are substantially higher than previously. But he correctly notes that “when spring bonuses are added to the equation, there has been little increase for Cravath’s associates over the last two years. The law firm did not award spring bonuses in 2012, but last year paid its associates a small stipend in addition to a year-end award. When 2011’s spring bonuses and year-end bonuses are added together, total bonus compensation actually exceeds this year’s level.”

Both Jones and Lattman report that Cravath had $3.1 million in average partner profits for 2011. For perspective, that’s slightly above the $3.05 average for 2006, and not all that far from the $3.3 million all-time high in 2007. Needless to say, associate bonuses haven’t enjoyed a similar recovery. But depending on what happens in the spring, they still could, which leads to a final point.

Who’s right?

The answer is Elie Mystal over at Above the Law. Mystal observes that spring bonuses more properly belong in the analysis of total compensation for the immediately preceding calendar year. That is, a bonus paid in early 2011 is really compensation for 2010.

The analysis is straightforward. Big law firms waiting for more complete information on how the fiscal year will end preserve flexibility by lowballing the November bonus numbers. Evidently, Cravath concluded that its $3.1 million average partner profits for 2011 were inadequate to justify any significant spring bonus for associates in early 2012.

The fate of the “special” bonus

The question now is whether spring bonuses are gone forever. After all, they first appeared as “special bonuses” — meaning that they came with this implied caveat: don’t build those dollars into next year’s expectations. Of course, that message has landed on deaf ears. But it gives firm leaders a way to convince themselves that it’s fair to leave associate compensation far below 2007 levels, even though average partner profits have recovered almost completely to those lofty heights. Indeed, some firms have even bested their pre-recession records.

In all of this, two things are working against associates who dream of a return to the good old days (of 2007). First, the glut of attorneys grows as the demand for new associates shrinks. Second, most law firm leaders are dealing with a revolution of rising expectations among senior equity partners. The potential loss of a rainmaker strikes fear in the hearts of many firm leaders.

But here’s a reason to hope. True visionaries seeking long-term institutional stability let such troublemakers walk. They promote cultural values that transcend the impact on the current year’s income statement. They let resulting gains in client service and attorney morale produce ample financial and non-financial rewards for all.

And all of this reveals itself in how partners at the top of a firm treat associates at the bottom — a place where too many seem to have forgotten that they themselves once stood.

HAPPINESS IS…CRAVATH?

Posted on September 26, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Big law’s future has become big news. On September 25, The New York Times published a special section that included several articles on large firms; two are particularly interesting.

“Culture Keeps Firms Together in Trying Times” discusses the handful of large firms that have shunned the widespread eat-what-you-kill approach to partner compensation. It focuses on three firms, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Debevoise & Plimpton, and Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, all of which have retained lock-step compensation systems. For any class of associates, those who survive to partner continue advancing together throughout their careers.

“The only way a partner does better is if the firm does better,” says Debevoise presiding partner Michael W. Blair describing the behavior that follows such structural incentives.

Lock-step is a sharp contrast to most other big firms, which follow what Dewey & LeBoeuf’s management called the “barbell” system: Lots of service partners on one side of the barbell balance out a handful of star partners on the other side. Then-Dewey partner Jeffrey Kessler rationalized the yawning equity partner compensation gaps that this approach creates: “The value for the stars has gone up, while the value of service partners has gone down.”

Not worth it

The Times quotes Cleary managing partner Mark Leddy’s answer to the Kesslers of the world: “People who want to be a star and make $10 million a year don’t fit in here…Breaking the lock-step system for them would be an unacceptable cost to our culture.”

Why does culture matter? There are many answers, but Major, Lindsey & Africa’s recent compensation survey may have identified an important one. Almost eighty percent of partners in lock-step compensation systems are satisfied or very satisfied with their work. A closer look at the MLA survey reveals that the combined group of satisfied and very satisfied partners is about the same for lock-step as for non-lock-step firms. But the lock-step firms’ have a big advantage in the very satisfied group — fifty-five percent compared to only twenty-six percent for non-lock-step firms.

Satisfied versus very satisfied

That leads to James B. Stewart’s observations about Cravath, where he was an associate in the 1970s. In “A Law Firm Where Money Seemed Secondary,” Stewart notes that all attorneys in his firm were intelligent, well-credentialed and hard working, but those advancing to partner had something else in common: They loved their work. It gave them a huge competitive advantage over those who didn’t. Returning to the MLA survey, I think Stewart may have captured a significant difference between the lawyers who are very satisfied and those who are merely satisfied: Attitudes about work affect performance.

Stewart also notes that “of the 20 or so associates hired each year, one or two might be chosen to be a partner.” He concludes that “over the ensuing decades, Cravath doesn’t seem to have changed much.” He’s right.

But the rest of the large law firm segment of the profession has. In fact, many have modeled themselves after the Cravath attrition-and-leverage model, but they added an unfortunate twist away from lock-step compensation: Partners eat what they kill, so every year’s compensation review is a new self-justification exercise. That incentive structure produces a much different culture; most of it is ugly and little of it enhances a firm’s long-run stability.

About the associates…

Before getting too misty-eyed over life at Cravath, it’s worth pausing on one more data point. In the most recent Am Law Survey of Midlevel Associate Satisfaction, Cravath placed 119 out of 129 firms — down from 111 in 2011. The firm has been dropping steadily on that list since 2010, when it placed 84th out of 137. (Both Cleary Gottlieb and Debevoise did much better.)

A closer analysis suggests that Cravath associates do, indeed, enjoy their work. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to enjoy it enough to offset the things that place the firm near the bottom of the satisfaction survey.

Cravath scored above the all-firm averages in work-related subcategories, including quality of work assigned, opportunities to work with partners, and level of responsibility. But it received low marks in other subcategories, including likelihood of staying two years, morale, communication about partnership prospects, and family-friendliness. Lock-step partner compensation isn’t a panacea, but imagine how much worse a place like Cravath would be without it.

Following the money

Perhaps the most telling comment about the interaction between compensation and firm culture comes from former Dewey & LeBoeuf partner Ralph Ferrara who spent twenty-three years at lock-step Debevoise before making what he describes as “an imprudent decision” in leaving: “In my heart, I never left Debevoise; it’s a place that I still love to this day.”

If the bankruptcy judge approves the proposed former partners compensation plan, Ferrara will pay almost $3.4 million to help fund repayments to Dewey’s creditors. Even so, given the amounts he reportedly made at Dewey, his move in 2005 was probably advantageous financially. I wonder if the additional money was worth it to him — and how his heirs will spend it.

The Most Unfortunate Comment Award to Date

Posted on September 11, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

The words seem so innocuous — “federally guaranteed student loans.” But what do they mean when someone actually defaults and the government has to make good on its guarantee? A recent article in The New York Times provides the answer.

A brief review of the business model

This post is the latest in what became my unintended series on the law school business model. It began with The Wall Street Journal’s misrepresentation in a lead op-ed piece. The Journal claimed that Congress made student loans non-dischargeable in 1976 because of widespread abuse. That is, graduates benefited from government loans and then declared bankruptcy on the eve of lucrative careers to avoid their debt. There’s no delicate way to put this: The WSJ was perpetuating a thirty-five-year-old myth.

Then I considered law schools that offer tuition discounts in the form of merit scholarships. There’s no mystery there: a secretive process of awarding money facilitates an individualized approach to pricing that maximizes tuition revenues while enhancing a school’s U.S. News ranking.

Most recently, I turned to yet another element of the current law school business model: raising the list price of tuition while reserving the flexibility to move lower as needed to attract particular candidates.

Follow the money

Now consider the source of all that tuition money. Some people are able to pay their own way, regardless of the cost. But they’re in the minority. Matt Leichter reports that the 44,000 law graduates in the class of 2010 took on $3.6 billion in debt, up sharply from $3.1 billion only two years earlier. The number is climbing as tuition goes up.

The chances that recent graduates will secure a job requiring a law degree are about 50-50. Although others will get non-legal jobs that pay reasonably well, the ranks of new lawyers with loans they can’t afford to repay is growing.

So what?

Students now have an income-based repayment (IBR) option for federal loans; that may afford some relief. But as Professor William Henderson explains in “The Law School Tuition Bubble,” two problems arise. First, dedicating fifteen percent of income for the requisite twenty-five years of a total IBR plan is akin to a permanent tax on the already low incomes of those lawyers. Forget about saving for retirement or funding their own kids’ higher education.

Second, those IBR participants who make it all the way to the end of the twenty-five years will have their remaining loan balances forgiven. That will add more debt that that the federal treasury will bear — for anyone who worries about such things.

Default

For recent graduates with limited job prospects, IBR is better than nothing. But some will default on their loans, just as their predecessors have. This poses no problem for law schools; they’ve already collected their tuition money and don’t have to return it.

Default poses no problem for lenders, either. That’s because educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, except in rare cases that satisfy the “undue hardship” requirement.

Moreover, the federal guarantee kicks in for private lenders, at which point the government foots the bill. But that’s not the end of the story. As the Times article explains, the newest growth industry is student loan debt collection. Last year, the government paid more than $1.4 billion to debt collection organizations it hired to track down student defaulters.

A Most Unfortunate Comment

For anyone who doubts that this is unapologetic intergenerational exploitation of the young by the old, consider these comments from Jerry Ashton, a consultant for the debt collection industry and the winner of the most Unfortunate Comment Award to date:

“As I wandered around the crowd of NYU students at their rally protesting student debt at the end of February [2011], I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represented – for our industry. It was lip-smacking.”

Ashton included a photograph of several students to which he added these details: “a girl wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the fine sum of $90,000, another with $65,000, a third with $20,000 and over there a really attractive $120,000 was printed on another shirt.”

Someday this will all come crashing down. I fear that people like Ashton — and merger/acquisitions specialist Mark Russell, who described student loans as the debt collection industry’s “new oil well” — will make money on that event. too. Shame on them. Shame on all of us.

BLOOMBERG LAW INTERVIEW

Posted on August 25, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Last week, Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia interviewed me on two topics that are frequent subjects of this blog. Two segments are now up and running on the Bloomberg Law channel. Here are the links:

Law Prof: Why Discharging Student Debt in Bankruptcy is Good for Lenders
http://youtu.be/z4Q3Y4PRwqQ

Ex-Partner: $1M Salaries Should Satisfy BigLaw Partners
http://youtu.be/2TErRjB9j6Y

WHEN FACTS GET IN THE WAY

Posted on July 31, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Facts should matter, especially to newspaper editors. On July 25, The Wall Street Journal based its lead editorial on a factually incorrect premise. I happened to notice the Journal’s error because I’m writing a book about the legal profession’s current crises, one of which is exploding law school debt. But the WSJ blunder raises an important question: How often does the truth lose out to editors’ ideological convictions?

“You Don’t Owe That” suggested that current bankruptcy law proposals to modify the impact of burdensome student loans would “reverse a hard lesson learned during the 1970s.” The editors claimed that provisions barring the discharge of educational loans in bankruptcy occurred “[a]fter a surge in former students declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying their loans.” For that reason, the WSJ continued, “Congress acted to protect lenders beginning in 1977.”

Not true. There was no such 1970s surge. There was no empirical record of abuse to support the legislative change that began a 30-year slide down a slippery slope, culminating in an even more unfortunate 2005 amendment to the bankruptcy laws.

Perpetuating myths

Old misconceptions die hard. Prior to 1976, all educational debt was dischargeable. That year, Congress amended the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the discharge of federal educational loans until at least five years had passed since the beginning of the repayment period. Why?

More than 20 years ago, a thorough examination of what some critics characterized as a “loophole” that “allegedly allowed graduating students to discharge their loan obligations through bankruptcy on the eve of lucrative careers” was “more myth and media hype than reality.” More recently, the Congressional Research Service noted that the 1997 Bankruptcy Commission found “no evidence to support the assertion that when student loans were dischargeable the bankruptcy system was ‘systematically abused.’”

Fear and anecdotes — not facts or evidence — resulted in federal student loans joining the same bankruptcy category as child support, overdue taxes and criminal fines. Except for rare exceptions based on undue hardship, a person paid those debts or died, whichever came first.

Bipartisan blame

The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 continued the new five-year rule, even though statistical analyses from the General Accounting Office and a House report confirmed that earlier claims of abuse were “virtually nonexistent.” In 1990, Congress and the first President Bush extended that period to seven years. In 1998, Congress and President Clinton decreed that debtors would never discharge their federal educational loans. In 2005, Congress and the second President Bush extended that protection to private lenders as well.

The recent Journal editorial worries about those private lenders. No one has been able to identify the author of the 2005 amendment giving financial institutions that huge break. It also gave them something else: a new incentive to lend money with less concern for how debtors would repay it.

Framing the question

The WSJ position seems somewhat paradoxical for the otherwise libertarian-leaning newspaper. On the one hand, personal responsibility is an easy argument to make when focusing on young people who incur debt: “They should be careful and make better choices.”

On the other hand, what entitles such students’ older, wiser and more knowledgeable bankers to put the government’s heavy thumb (in the form of granting special creditor status to lenders) on the scale? For some law school graduates, the result is enormous educational debt for degrees that won’t lead to jobs necessary for repayment. Shouldn’t lenders feel the consequences of their poor decisions? Might everyone be better off if lenders sat down with pre-law students and asked them what they planned to do with their J.D. degrees before approving loans for tuition?

Moreover, from the debtor’s perspective, the underlying issue involves the exercise of a constitutional right. Against the backdrop of eighteenth century debtors’ prisons, the founders empowered Congress to enact uniform national bankruptcy laws so that a debtor didn’t risk losing all assets in one state only to be thrown in jail for not paying debts in another.

Accountability

Perhaps questions of accountability and personal responsibility turn on the characterization of the issue — and who should be accountable to whom. The Wall Street Journal is accountable to more than two million daily readers. Those readers assume the honesty of editors who include purported facts in an op-ed piece on important policy questions.

This time, readers got what an important newspaper’s editors would like the facts to be, instead of what they are. Even worse, most of them will never know it.

DEWEY’S L. CHARLES LANDGRAF: THE PLIGHT OF THE LOYAL COMPANY MAN

Posted on June 18, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the last — for now — in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders, especially its final four-man office of the chairman. L. Charles Landgraf (Rice University, B.A., 1975; New York University, J.D. 1978) had been a long-time partner at LeBoeuf Lamb when it merged with Dewey Ballantine in October 2007.

In the 1990s, when LeBoeuf Lamb needed someone to bolster its London presence, Landgraf went. When the firm established a Moscow office, he helped. When duty called to the Washington, D.C. office that he was heading in 2012, Charley landed in Dewey & LeBoeuf’s four-man office of the chairman. It quickly became a thankless job.

A partner’s predicament

According to a Wall Street Journal interview, Landgraf helped out after the firm had failed to meet profit targets for several years. Unable to pay everything owed to guaranteed compensation partners, he and Jeffrey Kessler “spearheaded” a plan (according to Martin Bienenstock in that interview). It would have paid off partners who had taken IOUs from the firm by dedicating six percent of partnership earnings from 2014 to 2020.

Always candid, Landgraf said recently that the plan was necessary because “the firm had a lot of built-up tension about the fact that we had a compensation schedule last year that exceeded the actual earnings, and that had been true for a couple of years.” “Built-up tension” is a delicate description of the plight facing a firm that organizes itself around so-called stars whose loyalty extends no deeper than their guaranteed incomes.

Go along to get along?

My hunch is that the plan to deal with this problem wasn’t Landgraf’s idea. He wasn’t among those listed in the “Senior Management” section of the firm’s 2010 private placement memorandum. Nor was he mentioned in April 2012 when Dewey & LeBoeuf identified for Thomson Reuters seven key players essential to the firm’s survival.

He may fit the profile of many big law partners who have spent years — even decades — in the same firm and retain a deep loyalty to something that has actually disappeared from their institutions, namely, a true partnership and all that it entails. Perhaps they defer too willingly to others who are supposed to be smarter, more knowledgeable and/or have superior judgment. But when things get rough, they step up and do what they can to salvage the situation.

Undue deference revealed

From that perspective, Landgraf’s interview for The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, May 12, 2012 was revealing. A day earlier, Dewey & LeBoeuf’s resident bankruptcy expert Martin Bienenstock had announced that he was leaving the firm. By the time the interview appeared, he was already on Proskauer Rose’s attorney roster.

But during The Wall Street Journal interview, Landgraf — who was then the only remaining member of the original Gang of Four comprising the office of the chairman — let his former partner do all of the talking for a firm that was no longer Bienenstock’s. In printed form, the interview transcript fills seven pages. Landgraf’s words barely consume a half-page.

Bienenstock credited Landgraf and Kessler for the plan that committed future partner earnings to pay guaranteed partner IOUs from prior years. Landgraf said that the lateral contracts were “something we’re looking at. Whether all the contracts were the subject of full discussion or simply known as a technique that was used…is still being reviewed.”

His next line suggested that others at the firm may have been a bit too persuasive in selling him a bad idea: “But the technique of using guarantees of all forms, especially in the recruitment of laterals and retention of key business users, is pretty widespread throughout the industry.”

For limited periods involving laterals? Maybe. For four- or six-year deals involving legacy partners? I don’t think so. For 100 members of a 300-partner firm? Not for something that should call itself a partnership.

Two days after that interview appeared, Landgraf was gone, too. As hundreds of remaining Dewey & LeBoeuf lawyers and staff around the world wondered what might come next, one gets the sense that he was trying to be a good partner to the end.

I don’t know if a final caution applies to Landgraf, but it’s an appropriate note on which to conclude this series: a team player serves neither himself nor his institution when he defers to others as they move the team in the wrong direction. It’s time to empower dissenting voices with Aric Press’s “Partner Protection Plan.”

DEWEY’S RICHARD SHUTRAN — RUNNING THE NUMBERS

Posted on June 7, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the fourth of a five-part series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Richard Shutran (Trinity College, B.A., 1974; New York University, J.D., 1978) joined Dewey Ballantine in 1986 and rose to co-chair of the firm’s Corporate Department and Chairman of its Global Finance Practice Group. He left his position on Dewey’s Executive Committee in 2010, but in 2012 became a member of the four-man office of the chairman tasked to save the firm.

The Dewey & LeBoeuf website described Shutran’s transactional practice as “counseling…with respect to leveraged finance and project finance matters, mergers and acquisitions, and restructurings and reorganizations….” That makes him a numbers guy, someone especially well-suited to the challenges facing his firm when it asked him to return to leadership as one of the Gang of Four.

The 2010 bond issuance

Dewey’s 2010 private placement memorandum included Shutran’s biography in its “Senior Management” section. At the time, Bloomberg news reported on the $125 million bond offering for which Shutran said that the bonds’ interest rates were more favorable than the firm’s bank loans. That was true.

As partners were checking out two years later, the Daily Journal reported that Dewey was renegotiating those bank loans: “Richard Shutran, co-chair of Dewey’s corporate department, described the negotiations as standard.” At that point, perhaps they were.

Another “bond” issuance

Meanwhile, the firm was pursuing what fellow Gang of Four member Martin Bienenstock described as “a plan to deal with the shortage of payments to some partners.” In particular, those with guaranteed compensation deals had taken IOUs during earlier years when profits had fallen short of targets. The “plan” was to dedicate six percent of the firm’s income for six or seven years to pay them off, starting in 2014.

In addition to ongoing bank debt, the first wave of 2010 bond payments came due in 2013 and would continue through 2023. Now another debt repayment plan — to a special class of so-called partners — would take another chunk of future partnership earnings from 2014 to 2020.

Funny numbers

At about the same time, Shutran moved to the center of another controversy – also not of his making – relating to his firm’s financial health. He assured a Bloomberg reporter that the departure of Dewey’s elite insurance group “had no impact on our firm’s profitability. That group was break-even at best.” But he also said the firm had earned about $250 million in profits for 2011. The American Lawyer didn’t think that number jibed with what Dewey had provided for the magazine’s annual rankings.

On March 21, 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported The American Lawyer’s retroactive revisions to Dewey & LeBeouf revenue and profits numbers for 2010 and 2011 — by a lot. For example, Dewey’s 2011 average partner profits dropped from $1.8 million to $1.04 million. Shutran suggested methodological differences were to blame:

“‘They’re just not comparable numbers,’ Mr. Shutran said. ‘That’s something people like to pick on.’ Robin Sparkman, the editor-in-chief of the American Lawyer, said Dewey & LeBoeuf’s numbers were given to them by the firm’s management.”

About that bank loan

On April 11, 2012, Dewey identified seven key players essential to the firm’s survival. Shutran wasn’t among them, but he responded to questions about whether the wave of partner defections had triggered bank loan covenants: “It has not had any effect under (the) agreements,” he said. There’s no reason to doubt him.

But the real problem by then wasn’t the bank loans. It was the accumulated amounts owed for annual distributions to partners in excess of the firm’s net income. As Bruce MacEwen’s analysis suggests, whether it’s called mortgaging the future or something worse, the result is the same.

Something went terribly awry at Dewey & LeBoeuf, but here’s the scary part: among big law firms, some of the things that created Dewey’s predicament aren’t unique.

DEWEY’S JEFFREY KESSLER: STARS IN THEIR EYES

Posted on June 1, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the third in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Apparently, Jeffrey Kessler (Columbia University, B.A., 1975; Columbia Law School, J.D., 1977) has become a prisoner of his celebrity clients’ mentality. A prominent sports lawyer, he analogizes big-name attorneys to top athletes: “The value for the stars has gone up, while the value of service partners has gone down.”

Kessler was a long-time partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges before joining Dewey Ballantine in 2003. After the firm’s 2007 merger with LeBoeuf Lamb, he became chairman of the Global Litigation Department, co-chairman of the Sports Litigation Practice Group and a member of the Executive and Leadership Committees. Long before he became a member of the Gang of Four in Dewey & LeBoeuf’s office of the chairman, he was a powerhouse in the firm.

Blinded by their own light

Some attorneys have difficulty resisting the urge to absorb the ambitions and ethos of their clients. Many corporate transactional attorneys have long been investment banker and venture capital wannabees, at least when it comes to the money they’d like to make.

Of course, not all corporate practitioners are myopic thinkers. Kessler proves that narrow vision isn’t limited to transactional attorneys. But the rise of such attitudes to the top of many large law firms has occurred simultaneously with the profession’s devolution to models aimed at maximizing short-term profits and growth.

Kessler was a vocal proponent of the Dewey & LeBoeuf star system that produced staggering spreads between people like him — reportedly earning $5.5 million a year — and the service partners, some of whom made about five percent of that. It was the “barbell” system: top partners on one side; everybody else on the other.

In such a regime, there’s no shared sacrifice. What kind of partnership issues IOUs to star partners when the firm doesn’t make its target profits? Something that isn’t a partnership at all.

Lost in their own press releases

Kessler regularly finds himself in the presence of celebrity athletes. That can be a challenging environment. But once you start believing your own press releases, the result can be the plan that he and fellow Dewey & LeBoeuf partner Charles Landgraf “spearheaded” (according to fellow Gang of Four member Martin Bienenstock).

To deal with outstanding IOUs to Dewey partners whose guaranteed compensation couldn’t be paid when the firm underperformed for the year, Kessler helped to mortgage its future: for “a six- or seven-year period, starting in 2014, [a]bout six percent of the firm’s income would be put away to pay for this….”

It’s a remarkable notion. Partners didn’t get all of their previously guaranteed earnings because the firm didn’t do well enough to pay it. But rather than rethink the entire house of cards, it morphed into a scheme whereby future partnership earnings — for six or seven years — would satisfy the shortfall. Never mind that there was no way to know who would be among the firm’s partners in those future years. The money had to be promised away because the stars had to be paid.

Sense of entitlement

Kessler gives voice to the pervasive big law firm attitude that without stars there is no firm. It’s certainly true that every firm has to attract business and that some lawyers are more adept at that task than others. But Kessler’s approach produced yawning income gaps at Dewey. Similar attitudes have contributed to exploding inequality afflicting many equity partnerships. For insight into the resulting destabilization, read the recent article by Edwin Reeser and Patrick McKenna. “Spread Too Thin.”

But does Kessler really think that he and a handful of his fellow former Dewey partners are the first-ever generation of attorney stars? Twenty-five years ago when average partner profits for the Am Law 100 were $325,000 a year, did his mentors at Weil Gotshal earn twenty times more than some of their partners — or anything close in absolute dollars to what Kessler thinks he’s worth today? Does he believe that there are no stars at firms such as Skadden Arps, Simpson Thacher or other firms that have retained top-to-bottom spreads of 5-to-1 or less?

Beyond his prominence in the profession, Kessler is shaping tomorrow’s legal minds as a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia. For anyone who cares about the future, that’s worth pondering.

DEWEY’S MARTIN BIENENSTOCK: PARTNERSHIP, PROFESSIONALISM AND WHAT TO TELL THE KIDS

Posted on May 24, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the second in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Martin Bienenstock (University of Pennsylvania, B.S., Wharton School, 1974; University of Michigan, J.D., 1977) was heralded as “one of the most innovative, creative restructuring attorneys in the country” when the Dewey & LeBoeuf spin machine put him at the center of an April 21, 2012 article in The New York Times. He seemed to be the perfect candidate to save his firm.

One item that probably impressed NY Times’ readers was his presence on the Harvard Law School faculty. That credential showed up on the firm’s Private Placement Memorandum for its 2010 bond offering, too. According to the school’s website, he taught the Corporate Reorganization course during the spring term 2012.

–

Apart from imparting substantive knowledge, he — like any educator — is also a role model for students. In that respect, what have future attorneys been learning from Bienenstock?

What does partnership mean?

Every law student learns the basic concepts: partners owe each other fiduciary duties; they share risk, gains and losses; they’re accountable to all other partners. But theoretical partnership principles played out much differently in Bienenstock’s firm after he joined Dewey & LeBoeuf and its Executive Committee in November 2007.

— Multi-year compensation guarantees went to some partners, including Bienenstock, but their pay didn’t depend on performance. Some partners say they were unaware of the scope and magnitude of such deals until an October 2011 partner meeting.

— Partner income spreads reportedly grew to more than twenty-to-one. In “Spread Too Thin,” Patrick McKenna and Edwin Reeser describe the destabilizing effects of that ubiquitous big law trend.

— A 2010 bond issuance obligated future partners to payments of at least $125 million, starting in 2013 and continuing to 2023.

— Top partners, including Bienenstock, thought they were making great sacrifices when the firm missed its income targets in 2011: they “capped” themselves at $2.5 million and took firm IOU’s to make up annual shortfalls from their guaranteed amounts. Continuing strategies that mortgaged the future, Dewey & LeBoeuf planned to dedicate six percent of its income from 2014 to 2020 to repay those IOUs.

— Questions have surfaced about the accuracy and sufficiency of the firm’s financial disclosures to fellow partners and third parties.

What does professionalism mean?

After Steven H. Davis left his management position, the Dewey & LeBoeuf spin machine put Bienenstock center stage as the go-to person who could work a miracle. Maybe it would be a “prepack” – a prepackaged bankruptcy that would allow the firm to shed some debts and become more attractive to a merger partner.

Maybe it would be a traditional merger.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

One thing Bienenstock made clear throughout: “There are no plans to file bankruptcy. And anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Ten days later, he and members of his bankruptcy group were on their way to Proskauer Rose.

Parsing Bienenstock’s statement about a bankruptcy filing is akin to dissecting President Clinton’s response to questions about his sexual encounters with a White House intern: “It depends on what the meaning of is, is.”

What does leadership mean?

Did Beinenstock have an actual plan for the firm’s survival or did chaos better serve the economic interests of a few top partners? Was he personally committed for the long haul or arranging his own exit? Was anyone really in charge?

Those questions went unanswered as speculation and uncertainty swamped the firm: One-third of the firm’s partners gone by the end of April? A memo invites others to build their own lifeboats, but attorneys and staff should keep working diligently for clients? Use personal credit cards for client copying charges? No mailroom? No IT? Why do senior partners keep asking for empty packing boxes?

Leadership is needed most in times of crisis. As Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Office of the Chairman went from four to three to two to one to none, leadership was nowhere to be found.

Accepting responsibility

When asked who or what was to blame for Dewey’s demise, Bienenstock demurred: “[N]o one saw the new world coming.”

Except plenty of other people did.

Were any of the summer or permanent associates whom Dewey stiffed Bienenstock’s former students at Harvard? If so, their real life experiences of the past three months taught them more about partnership, professionalism and leadership in some big firms than Bienenstock or anyone else could have communicated in years of classes. The question now is whether Bienenstock will be on Harvard’s faculty list next year.

DEWEY’S MORTON PIERCE: ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY

Posted on May 20, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the first in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Morton Pierce (Yale University, B.A., 1970; University of Pennsylvania, J.D., 1974) is an appropriate place to begin because on May 3, 2012, he told The Wall Street Journal that he hadn’t been actively involved in Dewey’s management for years and had stepped down from the firm’s Executive Committee in 2010.

Pierce is widely acclaimed as one of the country’s top mergers and acquisitions attorneys. He was chairman of Dewey Ballantine when its attempt to merge with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe failed in 2007.

A partnership within a partnership

Pierce was a principal architect of Dewey Ballantine’s merger with LeBoeuf Lamb. Based on Bruce MacEwen’s analysis of the financial data, Dewey got the better end of that deal. As for Pierce himself, The Wall Street Journal reports that he “had negotiated a pay package that guaranteed him $6 million a year for six years, according to a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement.” The subject of my next post, Martin Bienenstock, said that there were many such deals to lock up talent for at least four years after the merger.

Early in 2010 — the year Pierce says he left the firm’s Executive Committee — Dewey mortgaged its future with a $125 million bond offering (repayment due from 2013 to 2023). In 2011, the sixty-two-year-old Pierce negotiated a new deal for himself. The Journal continues: “[H]e secured a new, eight-year contract that would pay him $8 million for several years and wind down to $6 million in later years, that person said.”

Dewey’s next gambit: IOUs to the oxymoronic group — guaranteed compensation partners — when the firm didn’t earn enough current income to pay them in full. Committing future profits to make up for prior periods of missed earnings is, at best, a dubious strategy. At worst, it transforms a partnership into something that looks like a Ponzi scheme. It’s difficult to envision an attorney recommending the idea to a client.

A firm leader?

Pierce’s effort to distance himself from management is interesting. He’s featured prominently as part of the firm’s “Executive Office” in the 2010 Private Placement Memorandum for its bonds. Two years later, an April 11 2012 article identified Pierce as “one of seven key lawyers” who determined Dewey’s fate.

Until the day he left in May 2012, the firm’s website still introduced his biographical page as follows: “Morton Pierce is a Vice Chair of Dewey & LeBoeuf and co-chair of the Mergers and Acquisitions Practice Group. He is also a member of the firm’s global Executive Committee.”

Not my job

From a self-proclaimed distance, Pierce described Dewey’s leaders in the third person. When asked about an April 2012 meeting at which senior partners supposedly recommitted themselves to the firm and its survival, Pierce’s only comment was: “There was a meeting and I was there.”

Three weeks later, he told the Journal, “I think the executive committee did the best job that they could under the circumstances.” That article continued, “Mr. Pierce didn’t assign blame for the firm’s current situation.”

Pierce told the NY Times, “I am sorry about what happened” — as if some external event or rogue actor was responsible.

The nature of leadership

Even so, Pierce kept his sense of gallows humor while packing up for White & Case. Describing how he’d like to merge all of the wonderful firms that had expressed interest in taking him as Dewey imploded, he told The Wall Street Journal on May 3: “Although looking at the Dewey & LeBoeuf merger, maybe mergers aren’t such a good idea.”

I suspect that most of the 2,000 Dewey lawyers and staffers who once worked at the firm don’t think Pierce has much of a future in comedy. He didn’t mention his other non-joke: that his resignation letter reportedly claimed that the firm owed him $61 million.

If the Dewey spin machine and website description were accurate, Pierce remained at the center of power until the moment he resigned from the firm. If, as he claims, he wasn’t involved in management after 2010, that’s worse. The notion that someone of Pierce’s professional stature would remain on the sidelines as his firm pursued misguided strategies and then would watch it spin into oblivion is stunning.

Senior partners in big firms often complain about young lawyers’ unwillingness to take responsibility for mistakes and their consequences. Perhaps some of the profession’s so-called leaders could set a better example.

DEWEY: PROFILES IN SOMETHING

Posted on May 15, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Some key players in the Dewey & LeBoeuf debacle are also among the profession’s leaders; that makes them role models. Some teach at law schools; that means they’re shaping tomorrow’s attorneys, too. But how do they look and sound without the Dewey spin machine?

Some readers might worry that spotlighting them erodes civility. But civility goes to the nature of discourse; it can never mean turning a blind eye to terrible things that a few powerful people do to innocent victims. Sadly, the personalities and trends that unraveled Dewey aren’t unique to it.

As to former chairman Steven H. Davis, David Lat’s analysis at Above the Law and Peter Lattman’s report at the NY Times are sufficient; there’s no reason to pile on. Rather, I’ll look at the “Gang of Four” plus one: the men comprising the four-man office of the chairman who replaced Davis as the firm came unglued, and Morton Pierce. Here’s a preview.

Morton Pierce was chairman of Dewey Ballantine when merger discussions with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe failed and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & McRae entered the picture. After spearheading the deal with Davis, Pierce locked in a multi-year $6 million annual contract that he reportedly enhanced in the fall of 2011. In his May 3 resignation later, he reportedly claimed that the firm owed him $61 million.

As he spoke with The Wall Street Journal while packing boxes for White & Case, Pierce said that he hadn’t been actively involved in firm management since 2010. But the Dewey & LeBoeuf website said otherwise: “Morton Pierce is a Vice Chair of Dewey & LeBoeuf and co-chair of the Mergers and Acquisitions Practice Group. He is also a member of the firm’s global Executive Committee.” [UPDATE: Two days after this May 15 post, Pierce’s page on the Dewey & LeBoeuf website finally disappeared. Such are the perils of losing an IT department too early in the unraveling process.] My post on Pierce will be titled “Accepting Responsibility.”

Martin Bienenstock, one of the Gang of Four, was an early big name hire for the newly formed Dewey & LeBoeuf. In November 2007, he left Weil, Gotshal & Manges after 30 years there. He got a guaranteed compensation deal and sat on the Executive Committee as his new firm careened toward disaster. As Dewey & LeBoeuf’s end neared, he maintained a consistent position throughout: “There are no plans to file bankruptcy. And anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

No one asked if he had a realistic plan for the firm’s survival. Ten days later, he and members of his bankruptcy group were on the way to Proskauer Rose. The title of my upcoming post on Pierce could work for Bienenstock, too. But because he teaches at Harvard Law School, I’m going to call it “Partnership, Professionalism, and What To Tell the Kids.”

Jeffrey Kessler, another of the Gang of Four, was also a lateral hire from Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He joined Dewey Ballantine in 2003. As a member of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Executive Committee, he became a vocal proponent of the firm’s star system that gave top producers multi-year, multimillion-dollar contracts — one of which was his.

A sports law expert, Kessler analogized big-name attorneys to top athletes: “The value for the stars has gone up, while the value of service partners has gone down.” The title of my post on Kessler will be “Stars In Their Eyes.”

Richard Shutran, the third of the Gang of Four, was a Dewey Ballantine partner before the 2007 merger. He became co-chair of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Corporate Department and Chairman of its Global Finance Practice Group. At the time of the firm’s $125 million bond offering in 2010, he told Bloomberg News that the bonds’ interest rates were more favorable than those from the firm’s bank. In March 2012, he said Dewey was in routine negotiations with lenders over its credit line. He also dismissed The American Lawyer’s retroactive revision of Dewey’s 2010 and 2011 financial performance numbers as much ado about nothing. My post on Shutran will be “Running the Numbers.”

L. Charles Landgraf, the last of the four, began his career at LeBoeuf Lamb 34 years ago. I don’t know him (or any of the others), but my hunch is that Charley (as people call him) is a decent guy. My post on him will be called “The Plight of the Loyal Company Man.”

In future installments, we’ll take a closer look at each of them. Sometimes it won’t be pretty, but neither is what some of them personify about the profession’s evolution.

A PLUTOCRAT’S PITTANCE

Posted on May 13, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Recently on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the usually thoughtful George Will practically jumped from his seat at the prospect that the interest rate on student loans might continue at 3.4 percent (based on a federal subsidy that President George W. Bush signed in 2007), rather than move up to 6.8 percent. He was — for him — apoplectic at the idea of creating what he was sure would become yet another “entitlement.”

Will opposes such relief because the average college student graduates with around $30,000 in loans and, over a lifetime of earning superiority over non-college graduates, he says, “that’s a pittance.” One man’s pittance is another man’s fortune, I guess. Then again, Will has a much different opinion about a slightly greater amount — $36,900 — when it’s the additional tax he’d pay on a million dollars of annual income if the Bush tax cuts expire.

But rather than search for consistency that can’t be found, put Will’s comment next to Mitt Romney’s related suggestion that young people should do everything they can to attend college, even “borrow from your parents.” If only all college-bound students had parents who could float them six-figure loans for however long it might take to repay them.

About those big salary differences

That leads to the point that Will sidestepped: repayment could take a while. Will’s “pittance” argument relies on studies showing that a college degree produces better lifetime earnings for those who obtain them. Historically, that’s been true. But it ignores what’s been happening to the newest college graduates. The NY Times recently reported how unemployed graduates have been flocking to unpaid internships. Sadly, two years ago it ran a similar piece. Meanwhile, the Times also reports, they and their families are buried in debt.

Ultimately, many who get degrees will fare better than their non-degree counterparts. But at the moment there are more unemployed and underemployed recent college graduates than ever. Studies show that their delayed entry into the labor market will likely translate into huge lifetime earnings losses. As baby boomers defer retirement because the Great Recession wiped out their savings, the plight of young people worsens.

How about lawyers?

Among the most burdened in the youngest generation of debt holders are new attorneys. Their average law school debt exceeds $100,000 — and it’s climbing. So is their reported unemployment rate, especially now that law schools have to start disclosing the truth about their graduates. If you’re wondering why all of those students went to law school when there are legal jobs for, at most, half of them, deceptive deans have been a big contributor.

On their promotional websites, law schools routinely reported more than 90 percent of their graduates as employed. But they didn’t mention that the number included those with part-time jobs, non-lawyer positions (like working at Starbucks), or temporary employment by the law school itself for just long enough to count in their U.S. News ranking.

A compromise

Tavis Smiley responded to Will’s position with this: Wall Street bankers got zero-interest rate loans from the government; why can’t students get a break on theirs? That’s not a bad question. However, not all students need relief from their student loans. Families like the ones Mitt Romney had in mind sure don’t, but many others do. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled one — a 34-year old unemployed attorney with more than $200,000 in educational loans, mostly from law school: “It’s a noose around my neck that I see no way out of.”

Here’s a compromise: get rid of the noose by returning to pre-1976 bankruptcy rules. In those days, any baby boomer who wanted out of even federal student loan debt could get it. Filing for bankruptcy was an extreme step and few did it. In fact, there was never empirical support for changing the rule. There was even less reason for the added protection against discharge that private lenders received in 2005 — a change that no legislator is currently willing to admit sponsoring.

Those who cry “moral hazard” should prove it — not simply list a theoretical parade of horribles that never happened under the old rule. If the bankruptcy option was good enough for baby boomers, it should be good enough for their kids.

DEWEY: WHEN PARTNERS AREN’T REALLY PARTNERS

Posted on May 2, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Lost in the haze of battle over Dewey & LeBoeuf’s struggle is a remark that former chairman Steven H. Davis made in his March 22 Fortune magazine interview. That was Dewey’s first public relations initiative after it began squandering money on a crisis management/public relations expert. But it offered this kernel of inadvertent insight:

“One fundamental change in the way the firm has operated since the merger is that they moved away from the traditional lockstep compensation approach — where partners are basically paid in terms of tenure — and toward a star system in which the top moneymakers can out-earn their colleagues by a ratio of up to 10-to-1. Davis says the extremes shouldn’t define the system, though, and that the more ‘normal’ band is about 6-to-1. Still, it must chafe to be the guy who’s earning the ‘1’ and knows it. Hard to see oneself as a ‘partner’ of the ‘6s,’ let alone the ’10s.'”

In The Wall Street Journal story that the Manhattan district attorney had opened an investigation into Davis, this sentence offered a poignant flashback to his March 22 interview:

“While some junior partners made as little as $300,000 a year, other partners were pulling down $6 million or $7 million, according to former and current partners.”

That’s a twenty-to-one spread within a so-called partnership. And some of the biggest winners had multi-year guaranteed compensation deals.

There’s an asterisk. According to The American Lawyer‘s definitions, Dewey & LeBoeuf has equity and non-equity partners. Everyone knows that with respect to the internal power dynamics of two-tier firms, management pays no attention to non-equity partners. But the real kicker is that most equity partners don’t have much influence with senior leaders, either.

The growing non-equity partner bubble

Start with the non-equity partners. In January 2000, predecessor firm Dewey Ballantine had 118 equity partners and 21 non-equity partners. At the time, its eventual merger partner, LeBoeuf Lamb, had a similar ratio: 187 equity partners and 33 non-equity partners. Between them, they had 305 equity partners and 54 non-equity partners.

As of January 1, 2012, Dewey & LeBoeuf had 190 equity partners (one-third fewer than the separate firms’ combined total in 2000) and 114 non-equity partners (twice as many as in 2000).

Many firms have adopted and expanded two-tier partnership structures. That has many unfortunate consequences for the firms that create a permanent sub-class of such individuals. But non-equity partners are profit centers and most big law leaders say that ever-increasing profits are necessary to attract and retain top talent.

The equity partner income gap

That leads to a second point. Whether it’s Davis’s earlier “10-to-1” spread, the more recently reported “20-to-1,” or something in between, the income gap within equity partnerships has exploded throughout big law. That’s destabilizing.

The gap results from and reinforces a failing a business model. In the relentless pursuit of high-profile lateral hires, law firms bid up the price. Many laterals never justify their outsized compensation packages; some become serial laterals moving from firm to firm.

Even when the subsequent economic contributions of hot prospects seem to validate their worth on paper, aggressive lateral hiring erodes partnership values. The prevailing business model has no metric for collegiality, a shared sense of purpose, or the willingness to weather tough times. How badly frayed have partnership bonds become when, as at Dewey, some partners ask a district attorney to prosecute the firm’s most recent chairman? That’s the definition of bottoming-out.

It’s easy to identify the ways that Dewey’s problems were unique, such as guaranteeing partner compensation and issuing bonds. Leaders of other firms could benefit from a different exercise: assessing how their own institutions are similar to what Dewey & LeBoeuf became after their 2007 merger. Growing partnership inequality is pervasive and its implications are profound.

Legal consultant Peter Zeughauser told The Wall Street Journal, “It’s not your mother’s legal industry anymore. It’s a tougher business.” Implicit in that observation lies a deeper truth: partnerships aren’t really partnerships anymore.

They’re businesses, only worse. Those at the top of most big law firms function with far greater independence than corporate CEOs who must answer to a board of directors and shareholders. In many big firms, a growing internal wealth gap reinforces the hubris of senior leaders who answer to no one — except each other. With Dewey’s disintegration, we’re seeing where that can lead.

SPINNING DEWEY’S HEROES

Posted on April 25, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Dewey & LeBoeuf’s latest designated savior is Martin J. Bienenstock. The NY Times says that he faces “perhaps the most challenging assignment of his career: the restructuring of his own law firm.”

According to the Times, his challenges include bank negotiations to restructure Dewey’s outstanding loans, consideration of reorganization options, and avoiding liquidation. Given the complex array of fiduciary duties accompanying such a job description — as a partner to his fellow partners while also acting as counsel to the partnership as a whole without favoring any individual partner or group of partners — it’s a daunting task.

Last month’s star was Steven H. Davis, whose assurances during an interview for Fortune magazine produced an article titled “Dewey & LeBoeuf: Partner exodus is no big deal.” Right — Dewey started the year with 300 partners; 30 were gone by the time of Davis’s interview; 40 more have left since then. Among his least prescient remarks: “If the direction we’re taking the firm in was somehow disapproved of, then the reality is that there ought to be a change in management. But I don’t sense that.”

The more things change…

Less than a week later, a five-man executive committee replaced Davis. One member of the new “office of the chairman” is Bienenstock. It’s ironic because he exemplifies Dewey’s business strategies that may have worked well in his case, but less so in others’, namely, lateral hiring and compensation guarantees. Prior to joining Dewey & Leboeuf in November 2007 (a month after the merger creating it), he’d spent 30 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. While he sat on Dewey’s management committee that Davis chaired, his new firm became one of the top-10 in 2011 lateral partner hiring.

According to The Lawyer, Bienenstock was reportedly among those who recently agreed to cap personal earnings at $2.5 million. That’s a start, but the article also said that some partners’ deferred income took the form of promissory notes due in 2014. It’s interesting that a firm already on a $125 million hook for something that law firms rarely do — offering bonds that begin to come due in April 2013 — would add even more short-term debt to its balance sheet. Add it to the list of unexpected complications that accompany partnership compensation guarantees.

The real Dewey heroes

This rotating focus on a handful of lawyers at the top obfuscates the importance of everyone else. Rainmakers come and go — and their seven-figure incomes survive. Bienenstock is an example. So are the many former Dewey management committee members who have already left, including John Altorelli, whose parting words showed little compassion for his former partners, associates, paralegals and staff. Even top partners who managed firms that went bust seem to land on their feet. After Howrey failed, its former vice chairman, Henry Bunsow, got a reported multi-million guaranteed compensation deal at Dewey in January 2011. Welcome to the lateral partner bubble.

Lost in the headlines about the stars are the worker bees with limited options and real fears. An Above the Law post from a seasoned Dewey paralegal captures the angst:

“I know these facts do not necessarily make for sexy headlines but I do ask that you report on the following. While some laugh and play their lyre as the city of Rome burns, it will be well over one thousand staff members who will also be gainfully unemployed.”

Add the nearly one thousand Dewey lawyers who have been watching quietly at the unfolding public relations nightmare since Davis’s bizarre interview. As Dewey’s publicity machine pumps out celebrity saviors of the moment, each has drawn more unwanted attention to the firm’s plight than the last. Martin Bienenstock’s appearance in the Times along with the proffered “pre-packaged bankruptcy” option is the latest example.

If Dewey survives the current crisis, Bienenstock’s suddenly magical touch won’t be the reason. Rather, it will survive because an entire law firm — partners, associates and staff — kept noses to the grindstone. The real heroes didn’t go looking for more media coverage of a troubled situation.

Perhaps Dewey’s leaders thought that better press could solve the firm’s crisis. But that approach reverses the relationship between public relations and crisis management, which is simple: manage a crisis properly and the resulting story will write itself.

Here’s the obvious corollary: manage the firm properly and there is no crisis to manage.

THE AGE-OLD PROBLEM OF AGE

Posted on April 18, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

When Kelley Drye recently settled the age discrimination complaint that the EEOC had filed on behalf of a seventy-nine-year old former equity partner, the focus turned to whether law firms could adopt mandatory retirement policies. The conventional wisdom is that they’re a bad idea — maybe even unlawful age discrimination. The policy argument is that people live longer; those who are productive should be able to keep working; everyone should be compensated according to the value added.

The legal defense of mandatory retirement policies is that true partners are employers and, therefore, outside the law’s protections afforded employees. The rebuttal is that most partners in today’s big firms have little say over their fate, so should they get whatever benefits the law provides, including compensation based on their contributions.

As framed, the debate is incomplete.

Definitional confusion

Mandatory retirement is a misnomer. The issue isn’t whether partners can continue practicing law at their firms. Rather, the question is whether they should remain equity partners in a world where achieving that status is increasingly difficult. In other words, the dispute isn’t about any senior attorney’s devotion to the practice of law; it’s about the money he or she should get paid for doing it.

No one told Eugene D’Ablemont that he couldn’t continue working on his client matters. Indeed, he did for more than a decade after reaching Kelley Drye’s equity partner age limit of seventy. He simply wanted compensation appropriate for his economic contribution to the firm.

Salary as a “lifetime partner” (plus a bonus) wasn’t enough for him, even though Kelley Drye reportedly asserted in response to the original complaint that D’Ablemont billed only between 195 and 324 hours a year during the late 2000s. But he’d mustered letters from two clients who said that his personal involvement in their affairs over many years meant that his inability to take the lead on future matters “created a rather difficult situation” for the company.

Ay, there’s the rub.

The problematic dark side

Most big law firms have evolved — or devolved — into short-term bottom-line businesses. An eat-what-you-kill approach to compensation encourages partners to keep client relationships away from others who might claim billing credit when year-end reviews roll around. Likewise, the lateral hiring frenzy makes such behavior even more important to attorneys who want to preserve their options and demonstrate their dollar value.

As a result, aging partners have no reason to institutionalize clients by nurturing relationships with younger lawyers. For those who have little or no desire to confront either their own mortality or the prospect of life after their big firm careers, the incentives of most firms are unambiguous: keep what you have and try to keep anyone else from claiming any part of it.

Who benefits from this system? Equity partners who have already pulled up the ladder on the next generation by promoting fewer lawyers and making them wait longer.

Who suffers? Young attorneys who want opportunities and training. Apart from blockage and embedding economic interests in an aging group that is myopically self-interested, the system offers no reason for senior lawyers to become mentors.

What is collateral damage? The firms themselves. The failure of elders to encourage their clients to trust the firm’s next generation produces long-term institutional instability.

At the heart of the problem is a short-term metrics-driven model that fails to guide aging partners to productive lives after the law. Aric Press suggests ways that firms could do better. Meanwhile, the absence of mandatory retirement rules for equity partners will make existing intergenerational tensions worse as they undermine the fabric of many firms.

Again, no one is saying that such elders can’t continue practicing for as long as they want. But that doesn’t require hanging on to a slice of the equity pie.

As for clients who worry about a “difficult situation” that might result if their long-time counselor will no longer be lead attorney into his or her eighties, consider this: eventually, everyone dies. There’s nothing that even the EEOC can do about that.

UNFORTUNATE (AND IRONIC) COMMENT AWARD

Posted on April 10, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

If Dewey & LeBeouf has so-called friends like its former partner John Altorelli…well, you know the rest.

Altorelli’s recent comments to Am Law Daily include so many candidates for my Unfortunate Comment Award that it’s difficult to choose just one. So let’s go with the most ironic. In discussing whether Dewey could have done a better job managing information — presumably referring to publicity about attorney layoffs, partner departures and financial results — Altorelli said:

“In most law firms, I think, as good as the lawyers are at advising clients, they’re not as good at taking their own advice. They are surprisingly obtuse when it comes to their own situation.”

He then proceeded to reveal himself as someone surprisingly obtuse about his own situation. Before listing those inadvertent revelations, consider how Altorelli himself embodies the lateral partner hiring phenomenon that has overtaken much of big law as a dominant business strategy.

The revolving lateral door

After graduating from Cornell Law School in 1993, Altorelli made his way through four law firms in only fourteen years — LeBeouf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, Paul Hastings, Reed Smith, and Dewey Ballantine (shortly after the collapse of Dewey’s merger talks with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and a few months before its October 2007 merger with his original firm, LeBeouf Lamb). Such a journey is not likely to produce deep institutional loyalties anywhere.

He’s not unique. For example, as I composed this post The Wall Street Journal reported that Brette Simon had left Jones Day to join Bryan Cave. Since graduating in 1994, she’s also worked at O’Melveney & Myers, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.

Still, Altorelli’s book of business apparently qualified him for a place on Dewey & LeBeouf’s executive committee. He says former chairman Steven H. Davis will “take the axe” for whatever is going wrong now, but surely the firm’s executive committee wasn’t a collection of potted plants. It seems improbable that Davis alone could have forged and executed Dewey initiatives that issued bonds and used guaranteed multi-year compensation contracts to lure prominent lateral partners.

But now Altorelli says: “The only people who need contracts are those who are not so secure. I feel bad that firms have to go that way, in competition for laterals and the like.”

Not my fault

Then again, Altorelli also suggests that management hasn’t contributed to Dewey’s current problems. Rather, it was just “bad timing” of a long recession that didn’t allow the firm to burn off expenses associated with the Dewey-LeBeouf merger: “We kept thinking it’ll get better tomorrow, then it doesn’t get better. The next thing you know it’s been four years.”

Magical thinking rarely results in a winning strategic plan. Curiously, Altorelli also notes that during that same period while he was at the firm, he and Dewey prospered: “I had five of the best years of my career.”

As he headed for his fifth big firm in nineteen years, Altorelli offered several additional insights that qualify for stand alone Unfortunate Comment Awards, especially coming from one of the firm’s recent executive committee members who professes continuing hope for Dewey’s future:

— “I’m not sure how they can weather the departures.”

— “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say, I don’t know how many more they can suffer.”

— “[There] could be a survival path for a smaller Dewey. I don’t know how that would work. They seem to have a strategy. Or the firm will be busted up into a bunch of little pieces and survive in the hearts and souls of a lot of good people.”

Yet perhaps the unkindest cut of all came in contrasting his professional life at Dewey with things that will be better at DLA Piper, where he will serve on its executive committee:

“Altorelli says he was drawn to his new firm by the chance to help change the way he practices law. Altorelli…says the firm is experimenting with ways to ‘try to get back to more of an intellectual pursuit, rather than just grinding out the paper.'”

If Altorelli’s interview had appeared five days earlier, I would have looked for this concluding line: “April Fool!”

Just delete “April.”

THE GOLDMAN CULTURE

Posted on March 20, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

After twelve years at Goldman Sachs, 33-year-old Greg Smith decided he’d seen enough. He resigned because, as he put it, “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.”

Let’s do what lawyers do best: distinguish him away and move on.

The Times op-ed describes Smith as former executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After Smith’s public condemnation, CEO Lloyd Blankfein and President Gary Cohn sent employees a memo saying that he was one of 12,000 vice presidents out of 33,000 employees. He reportedly earned $500,000 last year, which would put him far down the Goldman food chain.

Analogizing to a big law firm, Smith would probably be the equivalent of a non-equity partner. That doesn’t make his observations irrelevant or wrong, but context matters.

As for what Goldman stands for, what did Smith think the firm was when he joined in 2000? An eleemosynary institution? It seems unlikely that the radical transformation he depicts occurred only after Blankfein and Cohn took over in 2006. After all, they rose to the top for reasons relating to the firm’s culture and values.

Case closed. Move on.

Any big law analogies?

Not so fast. If Goldman has accelerated in a particular direction, it’s not alone. In that respect, some parallels between trends at Goldman and the prevailing big law model are interesting:

– Management

At the top of Goldman, traders displaced traditional investment bankers. That bespeaks a shift from long-term thinkers to short-term profit-maximizers. Once in power, Blankfein (a former commodities trader) surrounded himself with “like-minded executives — ‘Lloyd loyalists,’” according to the Times in 2010.

Transactional attorneys have similarly risen to lead many big law firms. Along the way, they have absorbed the business school mentality of corporate clients. Dissent is not always a cherished value.

– Resulting culture changes

Goldman’s determination to represent all sides of a deal recently became the subject of Delaware Chancellor Leo Strine’s highly critical opinion of the firm. Likewise, large law firms have perfected techniques to maximize their representational flexibility. Those techniques have been essential to the remarkable growth that many firms have experienced.

– Metrics

Goldman’s leverage ratio is stunning: 442 partners out of more than 33,000 employees. As a group, large law firms have pulled up ladders, widened the top-to-bottom range within equity partnerships, and doubled attorney-to-equity partner leverage ratios since 1985.

– Partner Wealth

Goldman’s partners are famously rich. Many big law equity partners now enjoy seven- and even eight-figure incomes previously reserved for media celebrities, professional athletes, corporate CEOs, and — yes — their investment banker clients.

Yet the most important question is mission. Smith’s op-ed suggests that Goldman had become focused on squeezing money out of clients. Last year, The Wall Street Journal wrote about “Big Law’s $1,000-Plus an Hour Club” — senior partners who command four-figure hourly rates from clients. It quoted Weil, Gotshal & Manges’s bankruptcy leader Harvey Miller: ”The underlying principle is if you can get it, get it.”

A year earlier, Miller was resisting discount requests from the court-appointed monitors in the Lehman and GM bankruptcies:

“If you had cancer and you were going into an operation, while you were lying on the table, would you look at the surgeon and say, ‘I’d like a 10 percent discount’? This is not a public, charitable event.”

(Miller’s concluding line was ironic. At the time, his firm had already billed $16 million for the GM bankruptcy, which “public” taxpayer money was facilitating. Through January 31, 2012, Lehman ran up a $383 million tab at Weil Gotshal. Meanwhile, Weil recently reported average profits per partner of more than $2.4 million — an all-time high.)

Attitudes such as Miller’s are pervasive. It’s easy to single him out because he’s been publicly blunt about them. Greg Smith’s indictment was his way of revealing truth as he saw it. Sometimes statements from those at the top of large law firms allow the truth to reveal itself for all to see. Often, it’s not pretty.

THE RHETORIC OF MARGINALIZATION

Posted on March 13, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

By now, just about everyone knows about Rush Limbaugh’s vile rant against the third-year Georgetown Law student who had the temerity to speak her mind before Congress. This post isn’t about the subject matter of her testimony. Whether and which employers should provide health insurance plans that include contraception as a preventive care benefit for their employees will remain controversial, even after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

This post isn’t about Rush Limbaugh, either. He is what he is. To some people, he speaks truth in a straightforward, albeit colorful manner. To others, he’s a carnival barker whose hypocritical aim is to rile up 99-percenters in ways that feed his ego and divert attention from his own stunning wealth.

Climate of incivility

Rather, it’s about a climate of incivility that reserves a special rhetorical vitriol for women, especially those like Sandra Fluke. She is smart, articulate, and on the cusp of entering the legal profession from a top law school. Whatever else she learned at Georgetown, it probably didn’t include dealing with public descriptions of her that included words such as “slut” or “prostitute.” Or what to do when someone with a national radio following suggests posting internet videos of her intimate moments “so taxpayers can get their money’s worth.”

Even if he was telling a prolonged off-color joke, Limbaugh’s language was crude. But that’s because it expressed equally crude thoughts. The larger problem is that Limbaugh may have said what many other people — mostly men — were thinking. Any doubters need look no further than Gary McCoy’s cartoon in the March 7 issue of the New York Daily News or other comments throughout the blogosphere echoing support for Limbaugh’s sentiments.

More disturbing is the fact that such attitudes aren’t limited to criticizing women who speak in favor of contraception for health plans. Even conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Reagan’s speechwriters, spoke about the broader issue on the March 11, 2012 episode of “Meet The Press”:

“One of the big problems with discourse in America is the way — forget left and right for a second — it’s the way women are being spoken of. Women in public life. Women in politics. Women and policy questions…Somebody has to stop and notice that this sounds like a horrible, misogynistic war on women. We have got to stop it. I feel like the grown ups have to step in…Left, right and center, it’s getting horrible for women now. Let’s stop it.”

A joke is one thing, but…

Noonan’s complaint goes to the language of marginalization. Relegating another human being to a distasteful subcategory of the species makes evaluating that person on the merits unnecessary. At a minimum, it infects the assessment. As the number of powerful females grows, words of marginalization become interpersonal weapons of mass destruction. Such words are also like cockroaches — for every one that crawls into the public light, a hundred more thrive in darkness.

What’s the relevance to the legal profession? None, some might argue. After all women have risen from a quarter of all law students in 1975 to almost half today. Yet something is amiss. Just look at the dismal representation of women at the top of big law: they comprise only 16 percent of equity partners in firms responding to the latest NALP survey. (Half of all firms refused to respond at all. Draw your own inferences.)

Most of the men running large firms aren’t Limbaughs. In fact, there are many benign reasons for the absence of equity partner gender parity in large firms. But I don’t think those benign reasons are a complete explanation. Drilling down into the growing top-to-bottom compensation gap within equity partnerships would probably reveal another dramatic manifestation of the problem. Whether public or private, the thought is the father to the deed; words of marginalization can bridge the two.

The gender-specific aspect to all of this is both vicious and hypocritical. Would Limbaugh have used such reprehensible language to describe another man? What if, during an interlude between one of his four marriages, he had taken Viagra or Cialis and had a prescription drug benefit that paid for it? What would that make him or any other similarly situated male?

Whatever the answers, I have no desire to watch any of Limbaugh’s videos.

	Mike on AN ARROGANT SUPREME COURT IS N…
	thebellyofthebeast on My Latest Interview
	Tom Kieselbach on My Latest Interview
	thebellyofthebeast on Whatever Happened to the New Y…
	Jerry Esrick on Whatever Happened to the New Y…
	Laura Miller on HELP WANTED: Five Rational Rep…
	annette turow on The Lawyers Who Enabled Trump…
	thebellyofthebeast on Trump and His Allies Are…
	Annette Turow on Trump and His Allies Are…
	thebellyofthebeast on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
	Patricia F Bak on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
	thebellyofthebeast on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
	Bob Helman on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
	thebellyofthebeast on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
	MARCU, Aaron (ARM) on WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

Category Archives: FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES

ARE LAWYERS BECOMING HAPPIER?

LATEST SYMPTOMS OF AN AILING PROFESSION

THE DANGEROUS MILLION-DOLLAR DISTRACTION

THE TRUE COST OF THE WEIL LAYOFFS

MY NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED

THREE EMBARRASSING DATA POINTS

SOMEBODY’S CHILD

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

BANKRUPTCY AND BILLABLES

TWO YEARS TO WHAT?

THE LAWYER BUBBLE

BONUS TIME – 2012

HAPPINESS IS…CRAVATH?

The Most Unfortunate Comment Award to Date

BLOOMBERG LAW INTERVIEW

WHEN FACTS GET IN THE WAY

DEWEY’S L. CHARLES LANDGRAF: THE PLIGHT OF THE LOYAL COMPANY MAN

DEWEY’S RICHARD SHUTRAN — RUNNING THE NUMBERS

DEWEY’S JEFFREY KESSLER: STARS IN THEIR EYES

DEWEY’S MARTIN BIENENSTOCK: PARTNERSHIP, PROFESSIONALISM AND WHAT TO TELL THE KIDS

DEWEY’S MORTON PIERCE: ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY

DEWEY: PROFILES IN SOMETHING

A PLUTOCRAT’S PITTANCE

DEWEY: WHEN PARTNERS AREN’T REALLY PARTNERS

SPINNING DEWEY’S HEROES

THE AGE-OLD PROBLEM OF AGE

UNFORTUNATE (AND IRONIC) COMMENT AWARD

THE GOLDMAN CULTURE

THE RHETORIC OF MARGINALIZATION

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: