Biglaw

David Boies Dishes On Firm's Transition Strategy

A newly formed Management Committee will gradually assume day-to-day firm operations.

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“People don’t really ask what happens to the firm if I or Jonathan get hit by a bus tomorrow,” David Boies told me. As Boies Schiller Flexner has grown from an upstart firm to an established powerhouse, the public perception of the firm as beholden entirely to the fortunes of its name partners has diminished. With 15 offices and over 300 attorneys, the firm is an entity unto itself, poised to carry on long after its founders have stepped aside.

The key to this evolution is the firm’s long commitment to transition planning, a process kicked off over 15 years ago with the managing partners establishing an Executive Committee and eventually creating an Administrative Partner role to devolve certain management tasks from the exclusive province of the founders. While important steps in moving the firm into something more than the sum of the reputations of the names on the door, ultimate authority for the most significant firm management tasks remained in the hands of the managing partners.

Today, the firm took another big step toward a future with the announcement of a Management Committee — a four-partner team of Executive Committee members who will take on the day-to-day firm management tasks. Karen Dunn, Nick Gravante, Phil Korologos, and Damien Marshall will take on the management mantle, with Boies and Schiller serving as advisors to ease the transition. The Executive Committee, comprised of the Management Committee, Boies and Schiller, firm Vice Chair Bill Isaacson, Karen Dyer, Natasha Harrison, Alan Vickery, and Steve Zack, will have ultimate supervisory authority.

At first blush, this might all look like a plan for Boies to ease away from the practice, but if anything this is a clever ploy to step up his workload. In the first six months of 2018, he generated $35 million in billings, bringing in more money and a higher share of the firm’s total revenue than the average of the last three years by a substantial margin. Under the guise of a transition, Boies may just be clearing his plate of mundane management tasks so he can devote even more time to the real work of lawyering.

He’s got a trial next week on a high-profile Nazi art theft case, he’s working a matter best described as “the sun never sets on private equity litigation” — a series of overlapping arbitrations from London to Hong Kong that requires round-the-clock coordination — and he’s taking the reins from Judge Posner and Matthew Dowd in William Bond’s pro se battle. On top of all that, he’s delivering a keynote at the University of Miami Law School on the future of class actions and preparing to the chair the firm’s 22nd annual meeting. Hardly the schedule of someone looking to back away.

Management Committee member Phil Korologos, who bills himself as “the last of the single-digit employee numbers,” having come over from Cravath in 1998, says this is exactly what the firm gets out of this transition. “It’s great for the firm because it brings in young leadership at a time when David and Jonathan are still very much active and we want to be able to leverage that. This lets them concentrate on the good and fun work of lawyering… that’s a major benefit for the firm.”

As the Management Committee prepares to take the reins, the pace of the transition of management tasks will be gradual. Boies says some tasks — like billing and collections — will be handed over almost immediately, while others, like personnel, make take some time to fully transition away from the managing partners. Is he slyly pawning off the most annoying — if essential — tasks first?

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“That’s right,” he says with a chuckle.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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