Succession planning is part of the Management 101 toolkit that law
firms ignore at their peril. Too many firm leaders are reluctant to attend to
it, either intentionally ("it will all work out") or simply through
preferring not to take up a potentially contentious, personality-intensive
issue so long as there seems no urgency to it. Of course, once
it’s urgent it’s too late.
These observations are not academic. I had the happy experience
of being an associate at the late, great firm of Shea & Gould here
in New York when it was in its heyday, but after both Bill Shea
and Milton Gould retired in their 70’s, the firm ultimately dissolved
for want of strong and uniting management—a death that could
have been avoided.* Thinking about succession planning is also
timely: We’ve recently learned that Testa-Hurwitz is no more,
two years after the sudden death of marquee founder Dick Testa, and
my recent piece about Jay Zimmerman’s leadership at Bingham-McCutchen
shows the flip-side: That good, not just bad, things can happen
when a new leader steps in.
So bravo to Larry Sonsini of Wilson-Sonsini for
handing
the CEO keys to John Roos. Roos, who’s been at Wilson-Sonsini
as a corporate attorney for 20 years, is currently the managing director
of professional services and, in the small world department, a
friend of mine from Stanford Law School days. (Yes, I have
already congratulated him, and he has graciously and self-effacingly
replied.) Aside
from my own delight at John’s well-deserved elevation, why do I hold
this out as a model of succession planning? Consider:
- Sonsini didn’t have to do this now; he’s only
64 and clearly in a position to remain on the throne for as long
as he chooses. - Wilson-Sonsini may be at something of a strategic inflection
point. While it is pre-eminent in technology and venture
capital circles, and sizable by any standard (600 lawyers, #46
on the AmLaw 100), it’s heavily Bay Area-centric: Palo Alto
and SF aside, none of its offices has more than 30 attorneys. If
they aspire to be a Latham & Watkins or an Orrick, a different
approach is called for. - Sonsini has not attempted to clone himself and appoint a mirror-image
successor: Instead, he has self-consciously moved to "institutionalize"
(his word) management. While Roos becomes CEO, Jeffrey Saper,
now managing director of business development, will become vice
chairman and focus on client development.
John sums up the change with pith: "We are a major company
that needs full-time management."
GE has been written about in the management literature as a virtual
finishing school for CEO’s. AmLaw 100 firms could do worse
than taking a page from that playbook.
*Trivia fact: Bill Shea is the “Shea” in Shea Stadium. Huuuh? you ask. After the Dodgers decamped from Brooklyn to LA, New York was for some time without a National League baseball team. Eventually Major League Baseball got around to talking about giving an “expansion” National League team to another city–but not to New York! Bill Shea, who was unbelievably well-connected politically, started a movement to create a third, new baseball league, the Continental League, and planned, of course, to award this new league’s first franchise to New York. The National League blinked, New York got the Mets, and Bill got his stadium.
