Biglaw

Office Porn: How Does Your Firm's Art Collection Stand Up?

This Biglaw office shows off its impressive art display.

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What do you see when you look around your firm’s office? Staid oil portraits of long-dead partners? Some Napoleonic naval clash you’ve never heard of? A number of Arbus originals? My last firm office boasted the latter. But what exactly goes into decorating a Biglaw office, and what does it say about the firm?

When I was a kid, I read a bunch of books by Timothy Zahn called The Thrawn Trilogy (affiliate link), mostly because they were about Star Wars, and my juvenile fascination with that universe had not yet taken a head-on collision from the S.S. Jar Jar. The story detailed the aftermath of Return of the Jedi and a resurgent Imperial threat in the form of a new character named Grand Admiral Thrawn who is roughly 500 times cooler than any villain we’ll see in the new movies. Anyway, while in repose, an officer commented on the artwork in Thrawn’s quarter. Thrawn explained that understanding a culture’s artwork is the key to understanding them in battle, culminating in this:

Thrawn: “It was my one failure, out on the Fringes. The one time when understanding a race’s art gave me no insight at all into its psyche. At least not at the time. Now, I believe I’m finally beginning to understand them.”

Pellaeon: “I’m sure that will prove useful in the future.”

Thrawn: “I doubt it. I wound up destroying their world.”

How friggin’ badass is that?

Barton Winokur would have loved Grand Admiral Thrawn. The former chair of Dechert leads Bloomberg’s Big Law Business through the firm’s art collection, which he largely cultivated during his tenure atop the firm. And Winokur makes very clear that he designed the collection to shape Dechert’s culture. The money quote:

When I started at Dechert, the art collection, such as it was, was typical of what you saw in a lot of law firms in those days. The idea was that the idea was you’re supposed to walk in and see something very traditional and feel safe and secure.

Lawyers are trained to look to the past and to repeat whatever mistakes were made in the past. That’s sort of the hallmark of being a lawyer, you always have to cite something that was said in the past.

As the world, I think, evolved, and the practice of law changed, actually what you needed were people who were more imaginative, more creative.

Check out the whole tour below, and be happy Winokur doesn’t have an Imperial Star Destroyer.

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Big Law Art Collections: Dechert [Big Law Business / Bloomberg BNA]

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