First Hogan & Hartsonmerged with Lovells. Then Sonnenscheinmerged with Denton Wilde. Now comes news that Mayer Brown is looking for a transatlantic partner — again. (Mayer previously merged with London-based Rowe & Maw.)
Mayer Brown and Simmons & Simmons have resumed merger talks, with both firms’ management set to brief their respective partnerships next week on the merits of a potential union.
Will this go merger go through? You know what they say: one is an accident, two is a trend, three is a problem…
A few weeks ago, news broke that Sonnenschein would merge with the U.K.-based firm of Denton Wilde. Today the firms announced that partners on both sides of the Atlantic unanimously voted in favor of the merger. From the Sonnenschein press release:
The partnerships of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP (SNR) and Denton Wilde Sapte LLP (Denton) today voted in favor of combining to form SNR Denton. Launching on September 30, 2010, SNR Denton will have more than 1,400 lawyers and professionals in 18 countries, forming a top 25 legal services provider worldwide by number of lawyers and professionals. SNR Chairman Elliott Portnoy and Denton CEO Howard Morris will serve as co-CEOs of SNR Denton.
The merger will become official on September 30th.
Congratulations to SNR-Denton partners, associates, and other employees. Let’s hope there are no redundancy layoffs on either side of the ocean.
One merger is an accident. Two mergers … well, that could be a trend.
The merger of Hogan & Hartson and Lovells is in the books. The new firm is up and running, and it’s already saying goodbye to people. The Blog of the Legal Times reports that Hogan Lovells had some departures over the weekend:
A six-lawyer insurance litigation group left Hogan to launch a D.C. office for Hartford, Conn.-based Shipman & Goodwin. James Ruggeri, who leads the group, said that the move was made because of conflicts created by the merger for his group’s chief client, The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. Ruggeri serves as The Hartford’s national counsel for complex insurance coverage matters. He had been at Hogan since 1991.
Hogan Lovells has gotten a lot of attention in part because it is the highest-profile law firm merger to take place after the recession fully took hold.
In our post last month about the merger of Cooley Godward and Kronish Lieb, we wondered aloud: And What About Mr. Lieb? His name was unceremoniously dumped from the moniker of the new entity, which will be known as “Cooley Godward Kronish.” Ouch.
Readers have subsequently informed us of what Richard Lieb is up to these days. He can be found alive and well, teaching a full load in the Bankruptcy LLM program at St. John’s University School of Law. He also still maintains an office at the firm, where he’s a retired partner (of counsel).
It seems that the academic life agrees with Lieb, at least according to one correspondent:
[H]e puts a lot of time and attention into his courses and, based on his reputation from many years of practice, has successfully enticed numerous”‘name” bankruptcy lawyers professors and judges to come and speak to his classes. As far as I know, St. John’s is the only LLM program in bankruptcy anywhere, and Mr. Lieb still has a remarkable command of legal principles and reported case law at his fingertips.
Glad to hear it. We hope to still have command of our bowels at age 76, to say nothing of “legal principles and reported case law.”
But still, the question remains: How does Mr. Lieb feel about having his name axed post-merger? According to time-honored law firming naming principles, one would expect the post-merger entity to be called either “Cooley Kronish” (a la “WilmerHale”) or “Cooley Godward Kronish Lieb” (a la “Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman”).
Our suggestion: Just call the firm “Suri Cruise LLP.” Publicity avalanche — and massive Google traffic — guaranteed!
(That would be almost as good a firm name as our reigning favorite: Saxena White.)
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In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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First Hogan & Hartson merged with Lovells. Then Sonnenschein merged with Denton Wilde. Now comes news that Mayer Brown is looking for a transatlantic partner — again. (Mayer previously merged with London-based Rowe & Maw.)
