DLA Piper

Dewey Have Room For Incoming Associates? Or Overseas Offices?

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It’s time for your daily dose of Dewey & LeBoeuf news. There’s a lot to cover, including updates about incoming associates, overseas offices, and contingency planning.

Word on the street is that Dewey is deferring incoming associates to January 2013. We reached out to the firm for comment, and they haven’t gotten back to us yet. But it seems logical for the firm to defer associates to early 2013, given how the situation at D&L remains in flux. By next year, Dewey will have a better sense of its ultimate size and its long-term associate needs.

Of course, incoming associates at Dewey might want to make some backup plans. Which brings us to the other D&L news….

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Former Dewey & LeBoeuf Partner Kisses and Tells
(About D&L, Not His Alleged Affair With a Russian Spy)

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John Altorelli

Who is to blame for the recent troubles afflicting Dewey & LeBoeuf, the global mega-firm created from the 2007 merger of Dewey Ballantine and LeBoeuf Lamb? In our recent reader poll, we offered four options: the legacy Dewey side, the legacy LeBoeuf side, both sides, or neither side.

Prominent M&A and private equity lawyer John Altorelli, who recently left Dewey to become a partner at DLA Piper, has some opinions on this issue. In a recent interview with Am Law Daily, he offered a candid diagnosis of what brought D&L to where it stands today, as well as an assessment of its future prospects.

Altorelli was less forthcoming when the New York Post contacted him over the weekend about his alleged love affair with a beautiful Russian spy (her picture after the jump)….

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(About D&L, Not His Alleged Affair With a Russian Spy)”

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Dewey Have A Problem With Defections? Or With Math?
(Plus information on international offices.)

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Defections continue at Dewey & LeBoeuf. On Tuesday, the WSJ Law Blog and Thomson Reuters reported on the departure of four M&A lawyers for DLA Piper. As we mentioned on Monday, antitrust litigator Eamon O’Kelly just flew the Dewey henhouse for Arent Fox. The recent departures take the number of partners who have left Dewey in 2012 to at least 40 (a decrease of about 13 percent in partner headcount).

The four attorneys who just jumped to DLA are John J. Altorelli and Alexander G. Fraser, who were partners at Dewey, and Patrick Costello and Gerald Francese, who were counsel. All four will be partners at DLA, and Altorelli will serve as co-chair of DLA’s U.S. finance practice, as well as a member of the executive committee. Although DLA is not a paradise, presumably the Dewey defectors determined DLA Piper to be more stable than Dewey (unless they took an “any port in a storm” approach, which is certainly possible).

In other Dewey news, the American Lawyer is revising the 2010 and 2011 financial results for Dewey — downward. And we’re hearing rumblings about some of the firm’s international offices….

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(Plus information on international offices.)“

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Which Biglaw Firm Is a Top Obama Super PAC Contributor?

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The common narrative, echoed by Mitt Romney supporters and others who hate dogs, is that Wall Street types are dropping the President like Randolph and Mortimer Duke tried to drop Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places. It’s like all of Wall Street said, “A Negro running our country, don’t be ridiculous.”

That’s the movie the GOP would like to write.

But, as happens so often, Republican fantasies bear little relationship to reality. A new report from Bloomberg shows that Obama is doing just fine when it comes to support from employees working at Wall Street’s best banks. It’s probably because female contraception is a lot cheaper than paying child support.

Obama isn’t just raising money from employees at banks. Quite a few lawyers are also in the tank for Obama. Employees at one Biglaw firm are leading the charge, and given the firm, we imagine that the money is pouring in from all parts of America, parts of Europe, and perhaps even the firm’s exploratory office in the Marianas Trench….

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Benchslapped: A Not So Fine Day for Feinberg Day

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Law is not like baseball. A lawyer cannot play for one team, make a name for himself, build a local following, and then jump ship and join the New York Yankees, only to come back next season to destroy his old teammates.

In law, once you represent a client for a significant amount of time, you can’t simply oppose them down the road, even if they are no longer your client and you now work at a new firm. Obvious, right?

Unfortunately for several former DLA Piper attorneys, something there got lost in translation. A federal judge in San Francisco booted the lawyers, now at the litigation boutique of Feinberg Day, from a patent dispute involving Toshiba and Talon Research. It turned out that the attorneys, who represented Talon Research, had logged more than 3,000 hours for Toshiba when they were still at DLA. Not good.

Let’s look more closely at our benchslap of the day…

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Where’s LeBoeuf? An Update on Doings at Dewey

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been receiving interesting reports about Dewey & LeBoeuf. They were nothing but vague rumblings for a while, but they’ve now reached the point where we have enough to write about.

So let’s check in and ask: How do things stand at this major, top-tier law firm? In other words, “Where’s LeBoeuf?”

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Morning Docket: 02.21.12

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She definitely loves wieners.

* Vedel Browne has been charged in the machete robbery of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He faces up to 20 years if convicted, and with that sentence, we’re betting he wishes he got away with more than $1,000. [CNN]

* ¡Viva México! These days, Mexico’s got more than just drug cartels, violence, and prison riots. More and more U.S. and international law firms (like DLA Piper) are crossing the border to set up shop. [Wall Street Journal]

* Which Biglaw firms own New York’s congressional delegation in terms of donations? The same Biglaw firms that have handed out bigger bonus dollars: Boies Schiller, Davis Polk, and Paul Weiss. [Politicker]

* Jury selection in the Tyler Clementi case is under way. Dharun Ravi, the Rutgers student who allegedly spied on his roommate, faces up to ten years in prison. Should’ve taken the plea bargain, bro. [New York Post]

* Some women like their wieners with a side of abuse, but that doesn’t mean they want the encounter memorialized on film. A federal judge says that’s too bad, so let the cameras roll. [Hollywood Reporter]

* Katherine Darmer, a Chapman University law professor, passed away after falling from a building last week. Her death is now being probed as a possible suicide. Rest in peace, professor. [Los Angeles Times]

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Sidley Opens in Houston, and DLA Piper Heads to Mexico (I’m Not Joking)

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DLA Piper scouts locations for its Mexico City job fair.

Some major law firms might be closing offices, but others are in expansion mode. For example, Sidley Austin is opening a Houston office, with partners snagged from several other big players in town. And that’s not the only expansion taking place in the southwest.

Take DLA Piper. When we last checked in with them, the firm’s Baltimore office was operating under third world conditions. The toilets weren’t working.

This led me to joke about a fictitious DLA Guadalajara office.

Evidently, my imagination failed me. It’s not “clear parody” if it’s something that could possibly happen. Next time we joke about a DLA expansion, we need to go to straight fiction. We need to start making DLA Mustafar jokes. Because expanding to Mexico just got real….

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Apparently They Don’t Brand for Prestige

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We like to talk a lot about prestige around here, but at Cravath, associates are learning that you can’t spend “prestige points” on your student debt repayments.

Branding is a little easier to take to the bank. It’s something that firm managers and leaders work hard to develop and maintain that can directly lead to business opportunities. As we mentioned in Morning Docket, Am Law Daily published an Acritas report on firm branding. The results will surprise the prestige conscious among you.

This list of firms with a stronger brand than the erstwhile bonus setters at CSM is astounding….

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Which DLA Piper Office Operated Under Third-World Conditions?

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The DLA Piper I-70 portable office.

You know how people make jokes about DLA Piper having offices in all sorts of random places and Third World countries — er, developing nations? Well, if you like those jokes, you are going to love this story.

At one DLA Piper office, they ran out of running water. No water to wash your hands, no water to flush the toilets.

But the associates still had to show up for work. Can you guess which office?

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