What’s the biggest challenge for a Washington, DC-based firm that
wants to grow? The lack of any meaningful transactional practice
in their own backyard. To be sure, regulatory, antitrust,
and litigation work are strong, but a claim to national, much less
international, status is an empty one without serious corporate
throw-weight.
The options, then, for breaking out of the DC sandbox are few:
- merge with a national, or at least a New York or California,
corporate power-house (this was the Wilmer-Cutler/Hale & Dorr
strategy, slightly exceptional only because Hale & Dorr was a
Boston-based tech heavyweight rather than a Bay Area tech heavyweight); - grow a transactional practice organically from within, primarily
by opening branch offices where such work can actually be found
(the Hogan & Hartson model); or - admit that governmental relations, regulatory and antitrust
work, are your "core competence" and open up in Brussels, headquarters
of the EU (Arnold & Porter).
Interestingly, while the Americans have had some success establishing
beach-heads in Brussels, the Brits have by and large been forced
to retreat after mounting forays into DC. The article doesn’t
speculate on why that may be, but a possible reason, and one that
stays away from invidious comparisons about entrepreneurial competence,
is simply that Brussels is a new and relatively open playing field,
whereas Washington is a mature and well-populated market with no
self-evident need for new entrants.
The need, however, to break out of the one-company town of Washington,
appears pressing to some firms: Although DC-based firms’
revenue was up 8% on average over last year, the AmLaw 100 as a
whole were up 10%—with the inevitable arithmetic implication
that non-DC-based firms’ revenue rose even more.
