'Project Rightsize' Strikes Again: Another Office Bites The Dust
On a happier note, congrats to the firm's ten new partners and seven new special counsel!
Think of Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft as the canary in the Biglaw coal mine.[1]
In July 2008, Cadwalader laid off almost 100 lawyers. A few weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the U.S. economy went into meltdown mode — taking much of Biglaw with it.
It’s January 2017, and CWT is once again having… issues. Is that a sign of big trouble for Biglaw?
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Over the long weekend, Brian Baxter broke this news on Am Law Daily:
Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft’s energy and commodities group is breaking up, with lawyers leaving for Allen & Overy and Haynes and Boone, part of a process that will see the Wall Street firm close a Houston office that it opened six years ago.
For those keeping track at home, this is the third Cadwalader closure in the past six months. Back in September, CWT closed two Asia offices and laid off 25 lawyers.
Looking on the bright side, no lawyers will wind up on the breadline as a result of this latest closure. The Houston office was small — partners Chad Mills and Tania Perez, special counsel Adam Roth, and associate Kathryn Shurin — and all four know where they’ll be working next. Tania Perez will remain with Cadwalader and work out of New York (after previously splitting her time between the two cities). Chad Mills is taking his talents to Haynes and Boone, where Adam Roth and Kathryn Shurin will join him. So perhaps the only folks who will lose their jobs as a result of CWT leaving Houston will be the support staff, assuming they don’t move with their lawyers. (We reached out to CWT to inquire about layoffs and severance in Houston but did not hear back.)
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“It was never expected to be a big office,” one CWT source said to us. And its closing didn’t come as a huge shock: “I always wondered why we still had Houston.”
What motivated the closure? Here’s what the firm told Am Law:
Cadwalader’s managing partner Patrick Quinn said the firm’s decision to shutter its Houston outpost was a reflection of its new emphasis on a core client base that includes big banks and financial institutions, large companies and hedge funds.
“This focused strategic approach has, not surprisingly, resulted in some of our partners moving on,” Quinn said. “We are sad to see our friends depart and wish them well. However, in order to provide exceptional service to our natural client base and a profitable platform for our partners, we must continue to pursue our strategy.”
Sounds a bit like… Project Rightsize? That’s what CWT tried in the 1990s and again around 2007-08, when it shed lawyers and offices in an effort to focus on its core strengths. It’s the middle of a decade, time for another Cadwalader “rightsizing”?
As a result of this restructuring, energy lawyers are exiting Cadwalader. Earlier this month, partners Paul Pantano Jr. and Athena Yvonne Eastwood moved over to Willkie Farr in Washington. As some of you might recall, Pantano was part of a large group of energy lawyers that moved from McDermott Will & Emery to Cadwalader six years ago, in early 2011.
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More recently in D.C. — just now, in fact — Allen & Overy announced the hiring of former Cadwalader partners Anthony Mansfield and Gregory Mocek. Mansfield and Mocek were also part of the original MWE-to-CWT group. Allen & Overy sounds thrilled to have them. From John Terzaken, head of A&o’s investigations and litigation group: “With extensive global reach and deep connections to the relevant industries, Allen & Overy is well-positioned for global commodities investigations and enforcement actions. Adding partners like Greg and Tony, both with deep CFTC experience, to our team will provide our clients the support they need to manage the growth of multi-billion dollar, multi-jurisdictional enforcement actions.”
In happier news at Cadwalader, the firm just named ten new partners — its largest incoming partner class since 1993. We’ve been tracking diversity in new Biglaw partner classes, and the CWT class is decently diverse. Four out of ten are women, which is slightly above the average for large law firms today, and there seems to be some racial/ethnic diversity as well (Sinjini Saha and Ed Wei are Asian).
In terms of office locations, seven of the new partners are based in New York, one is based in D.C., and two are based in London. The new partners reflect Cadwalader’s heightened focus on finance — almost all work out of a major financial center, and there’s just one litigator in the group, Nathan Bull (and much of his securities and commercial litigation practice revolves around complex financial instruments and structured products). You can flip to the next page to read the full Cadwalader press release.
Raise a glass to Cadwalader’s new partners, as well as to the future of the firm — because as Cadwalader goes, so goes Biglaw.
[1] Or, for those of you who have seen Arrival, the little bird that they take into the alien spacecraft.
Cadwalader to Close Houston Office in Core Practice Pivot [Am Law Daily]
Willkie Welcomes Cadwalader Energy Regulatory Duo in DC [Am Law Daily]
Allen & Overy adds two Investigations and Litigation partners in Washington, D.C. [Allen & Overy (press release)]
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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].
