In the most recent of what’s beginning to feel like a parade of star litigators jumping ship from BigLaw, comes word that Karen Dunn has left Paul Weiss to join a startup litigation boutique; in the first few months of its existence it’s already past two dozen lawyers and counting. Similarly, Abbe Lowell (another Big Name litigator) left Winston & Strawn, a lit veteran moved from Cadwalader to Roberta Kaplan’s new boutique, and Sidley Austin’s co-lead of white collar, as well as a senior Covington litigator, joined forces to found a fintech-centric boutique. But have any of you out there noticed which dogs are not barking?
High level corporate lawyers, that’s who.
I’ve periodically been keeping an eye on this asymmetry for awhile, but when it graduates from anecdote to pattern it’s worth asking why.
With the luxury of not having actually spoken with any of these people, I have a straightforward hypothesis. (What follows is therefore untainted by first-hand front-line intelligence; all I ask by way of mitigation is the high likelihood of futility.)
Litigators can be effective as solo superstars, with only a small staff of support (even that can be outsourced these days although you might not want to) whereas corporate matters require largeish groups of specialist practitioners working together as a cohesive and unified team in real time: People who specialize in deal structure, choice of law, intellectual property, employment, regulatory and shareholder relations, financing and the optimal recipe for blending debt and equity, analyzing the consequences of “change of control” covenants, assessing real and putative conflicts, shedding and acquiring real estate, and you get the picture.
Even very high-profile corporate lawyers are and should be cautious about moving to another firm knowing they would have to rebuild the team backing them up, without which they cannot deliver for their clients.
If you conceptualize clients as demand and partners as supply, demand coming from corporate clients tends to be steadier and more long-term, whereas litigation clients are episodic and, at the extreme, one-off’s. It’s simple enough: Corporate work is (no offense in the least!) keeping the trains running on time, acquisitions and divestitures, reorganizations and product/service portfolio shifts–the core of what a company occupying and striving to maintain a strong competitive position in the relevant market needs to do. But no for-profit company is in the business of being sued.
So if you’re in senior management at a BigLaw firm that recently lost some high-profile litigators, what should you do? I don’t mean to be glib, but a liquid market for talent flows two ways. If it’s relatively cost-free for talent at your firm to leave, the same is true for talent at other firms. Get yourself into the market and start identifying, and cultivating, talent you can rebuild with. Who knows? You might even find yourself trading up when the dust settles.
Courtesy Google Gemini image generation
