The Perspective Of Important Partners

I’ve recently chatted with fairly influential partners at ridiculously rich firms.

To give a sense of the people with whom I was speaking, while maintaining their anonymity, let’s say that I spoke to one partner each at two of the United States’ 10 most profitable firms.  These firms, and these partners, are doing quite well.

Two things startled me.

First, the condescension is getting pretty bad.

Years ago, I heard a rainmaker say that he wasn’t interested in the opinions of partners who were “unburdened by clients.”  That was pretty nasty, but at least it was funny.

Within the past few weeks, however, I heard someone say that his (or her) firm had recently lost a group of partners:  “We lost a group of about 10 partners, but only two of them were real partners.  The other eight were just service partners, so they didn’t really matter.”

Oooh, oooh, oooh.  That’s awfully snooty.

I realize that some folks do it all:  They attract business, and they do a great job of handling the business.

But that’s a fairly small minority.  Most firms need people to attract business, and the firms also need folks to labor in the fields, producing the top-notch legal work that keeps clients coming back.

Maybe the person I was talking to was one of the few all-stars, but that’s pretty unlikely.  I suspect the person was just a rainmaker, heavily reliant on mere “service partners” to keep clients happy.  A little less condescension might go a long way toward keeping this person’s law firm intact.

So the first thing I noticed was this relatively new type of snootiness.  I don’t think it existed 10 years ago, back when I was in private practice. 

A second thing also startled me.  Both of these partners, at two high-PPP firms, scoffed at the type of work that I did back at a firm:  Mass torts.

I picked my area of specialization the way everyone does:  A little bit of choice, and a little bit of randomness.  For a while, you gravitate toward the cases that interest you; later in life, you do what comes in the door.  For me, that was mass torts.  But there was some thought involved there:  When a mass tort hits, the defendant is immediately facing a corporate life-threatening event.  Logically, life-threatening events are those in which clients don’t worry too much about cost:  The client must win, price be damned.  (There were other reasons, too, for picking this field:  Mass torts are great for lawyers at all levels within a firm.  Junior folks get to take lots of depositions; senior folks get to try cases and worry about MDL strategy; for the most part, these cases use everyone to their maximum capacity.  Some of the cases are likely to go to trial.  The field of law is interesting.  I saw lots of advantages here.) 

But last month, the rich guys scoffed at mass torts:  Both of them said, in different conversations, that their firms rarely did mass tort work anymore because of price-sensitivity; clients wouldn’t agree to pay their firms’ rates. 

Both of these firms do, indeed, have eye-popping rates.   

I was startled nonetheless. 

The desire to raise rates has gotten to the point where only single cases that put oodles of money on the line are attractive to these extraordinarily profitable firms.  Financial institution litigation?  For the right cases, yes.  Private equity transactions?  For the right deals, yes.  Internal investigations?  For investigations raising worries in 30 different countries around the world and thus requiring a law-firm-empire, yes.

But a few thousand people claiming to have been injured by a drug? 

Clients may pay for top-notch trial talent.  In select cases, clients may pay for top-notch appellate talent.  But clients are not going to pay top rates to work up each of several thousand cases.  Either the work is being sliced into pieces — the less expensive firm works up the cases, and the client worries about hiring trial counsel later — or a less expensive firm (or group of firms) handles the cases from start to finish. 

In a sense, this is hardly an issue.  In the words of the sage, “May all your problems be tax problems.”  If pharmaceutical companies don’t want to use the most highly priced firms to defend their mass torts, so be it.  The drug companies survive.  The high-PPP firms survive.  And plenty of folks still make a living defending mass torts at perfectly respectable, if slightly more reasonably priced, law firms. 

But I, at least, shed a tear for my former self. 

I thought I was being so clever when I decided to go into mass torts, and it turns out I miscalculated.  Good thing I went in-house, I guess.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at [email protected].