Tag Archives: Charles Landgraf

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

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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: PROFILES IN SOMETHING

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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.