Biglaw, Media and Journalism, Money, Partner Profits

Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw-ling: A Bit of Backstory

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In case you haven’t seen it already, we’d like to call your attention to an update and correction to our last post about Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw’s decision — announced on Friday afternoon — to “de-equitize” 45 equity partners:

The premise of this post — that Mayer Brown intentionally tried to “get out in front of” this story — is incorrect. Our facts were correct, but our interpretation of them was erroneous.

It is factually accurate to state that the Chicago Tribune story [about the partner terminations and demotions] hit the web before Mayer Brown sent out the announcement email to its associates. It is also true that Mayer Brown representatives spoke with the Chicago Tribune about this news before the firm-wide email went out.

But there’s a backstory here that needs to be explained. We’ll have more to add in a subsequent post.

We now deliver the promised backstory. Check it out after the jump.


The partners at Mayer Brown who were canned or demoted affected by the partnership restructuring were informed of their fates between Wednesday and Friday morning of last week. They were told in advance of a partnership meeting scheduled for Friday at 11 A.M. (Chicago time).
Mayer Brown never intended to issue a press release or affirmatively seek out the media concerning this news. The firm had a statement ready, to deal with the inevitable media inquiries; but it was reactive in nature. The firm was NOT trying to “get out in front of” the story. Rather, it was hoping to handle the matter in fairly understated fashion.
Alas, intrepid boy reporter Ameet Sachdev, of the Chicago Tribune, got wind of the story. On Thursday afternoon, at around 3:30 PM, Sachdev contacted the firm for comment on what he had ascertained from other sources. Some of his information was correct, but some of it — including the number of partners affected — was wrong.
Mayer Brown wanted to make sure that what Sachdev reported was accurate — since he was going to report something, and some of what he had was incorrect. So on Friday morning, current chairman Ty Fahner and incoming chairman Jim Holzahauer met with Sachdev, at the firm’s Chicago office, to discuss the partnership restructuring.
At the time that they met with Sachdev, the Mayer Brown leadership had no idea when the Tribune story about the firm personnel changes would run. They thought that it would run on Monday, or maybe late in the day on Friday.
The firm was planning to send out an all-firm email about the partnership restructuring immediately following the conclusion of the 11 AM partnership meeting. And this is exactly what Mayer Brown did. The email was sent at approximately 2:26 PM EST (or 1:26 PM CST).
The Mayer Brown leadership expected that their internal email would go around prior to the appearance of Sachdev’s story. But as it turned out, Ameet Sachdev’s Tribune story went up very quickly — more quickly than the firm expected.
The news hit the Trib’s website shortly before the internal Mayer Brown email. The first version of Sachdev’s story was posted to the web at 12:59 PM CST; the internal email was issued at 1:26 PM CST.
So although it’s true that the Tribune beat Mayer Brown to the punch in announcing the news, it did so by a trivial amount of time — less than half an hour — and in a manner unintended by firm management.
To the extent that our earlier coverage implied otherwise, we retract what we wrote. We regret any misleading impression, and we hope that this post clarifies matters. We also thank our sources at Mayer Brown for setting the record straight on this.
Mayer Brown cuts partners [Chicago Tribune]
Earlier: Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw-ling: Getting Too Far in Front of the Story?

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