Tag Archives: Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe

ART, LIFE, AND THE GOOD WIFE

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The writers of the hit television series, The Good Wife, are onto something. Recently, Alicia Florrick and several senior associates left Lockhart & Gardner to form a new firm. They took a big client with them.

Art imitates life

One scene in particular is a reminder that fiction can reveal profound truth. Sitting in his office, Will Gardner concludes that Florrick and other former colleagues betrayed him just by leaving. He resolves that he’s going to get even by making his firm the biggest in the country: “I’m going to destroy the competition.”

Gardner wasn’t looking for a few talented attorneys who would serve particular client needs while enhancing the culture of his institution. He wasn’t seeking to shore up an area of lost expertise. He wasn’t even pursuing growth because it would benefit his firm financially. Rather, he wanted to preside over a big firm that would be significant – even intimidating – solely because of its bigness.

He instructed fellow partners to target rainmakers at other firms as potential lateral hires, announced the opening of a New York, and rolled out the firm’s new logo — “LG.” He wanted growth for the sake of growth. No other plan. No strategic vision. No institutional mission beyond getting bigger.

Real-life managing partners wouldn’t be so stupid, right?

Many large law firms are making news with their efforts to grow. This phenomenon is somewhat perplexing because law firm management consultants have reported for a long time that there are no economies of scale in the practice of law. In fact, they say, maintaining the infrastructure necessary to support growth pushes the bottom line the wrong way.

But in today’s no-growth era, many managing partners worry more about the top line. They want to acquire books of business through aggressive lateral hiring of other firms’ rainmakers and, in some cases, the ultimate lateral event – merger with another firm.

A path to where, exactly?

For the profession overall, the lateral hiring/merger craze is a zero-sum game. For individual firms asserting that clients somehow drive the process, it’s dubious at best.

“I’m pretty skeptical about the value these big mergers give to clients,” IBM’s general counsel, Robert Weber, said recently. “I don’t know why it’s better to use a bigger firm.” And that’s from a guy who spent 30 years at Jones Day — one of the biggest law firms in the country — before joining IBM seven years ago.

In The Good Wife, creating a big firm is part of Will Gardner’s personal vendetta. In the real world, vindictiveness isn’t the reason that most managing partners build bigger firms. But personal ego is often part of the equation. Many leaders see themselves as modern-day versions of Alexander the Great. The desire to stand atop an empire is irresistible.

In the coming weeks, Gardner will probably press ahead to create a large enterprise where name recognition alone confers an illusory prestige. Even if his fellow partners are inclined to question or, God forbid, disagree, they won’t speak up.

If Alicia Florrick were still there, she might have had the courage to challenge him. After all, she and Will had a steamy affair and her husband is now Illinois Governor-elect. But Alicia is gone and Will rules his firm with an iron fist, bare and unadorned with a velvet glove. At Lockhart & Gardner — as at many big firms – dissent is not a cherished partnership value.

There’s one more interesting aspect of Gardner’s battle cry. He hasn’t learned from his mistakes. In season two, Lockhart & Gardner merged with Derrick Bond’s Washington, DC firm. The clash of cultures and personalities nearly destroyed Gardner’s firm. Like all talented lawyers possessing the skill to distinguish away adverse precedent that doesn’t suit their current views, Gardner must think that this time will be different.

Luckily for him, Lockhart & Gardner is fictional. Notwithstanding his poor leadership decisions, the writers can craft a story line that will keep him and his firm going until the show’s ratings fall. Some real law firms won’t be as fortunate.

DEWEY’S MORTON PIERCE: ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY

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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.