Small Law Firms

Former CLO And Biglaw Partner Joins Virtual Law Firm As Managing Partner

With the legal industry in flux, the lines between traditional law firms and virtual law firms are blurring.

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David Reidy

David Reidy, formerly the Chief Legal & Compliance Officer at fintech startup Payactiv and before that a partner at McGuireWoods leading the national fintech practice, has joined Scale LLP as its new managing partner.

“The chance to lead Scale LLP is a once-in-a-career opportunity,” said Reidy. “We are living through a generational change in workplace culture,” said Reidy, “and the time has come for a top-tier virtual firm.”

Reidy takes the reins of a rapidly growing law firm with around 50 lawyers across 10 states that doubled its partnership over the last year. Founding partner Adam Forest describes the firm as heavily influenced by its Silicon Valley roots. “Innovation is in our DNA,” he said.

Part of innovation is adapting to the changing legal landscape by bringing in leadership with experience running a national Biglaw practice group and an in-house department. Reidy is quick to note that his legal department experience Scale’s complement of former in-house lawyers — including six former GCs — are critical to the firm’s business. When it comes to building relationships with new clients, it helps to have “worn the business hat” in the past he said.

While Scale LLP endeavors to continuing growing as “a top-tier virtual firm,” it’s an open question how long the word “virtual” is really going to matter.

Traditional, brick-and-mortar — or more accurately “steel-and-glass” — law firms are tentatively adopting three- and four-day office weeks. Some are embracing remote working arrangements to lure and retain top-notch talent outside of the law’s customary power centers. Meanwhile, a virtual law firm cracked the Am Law 200 this year earning one of the most recognizable chits of an establishment law firm. So what does it even mean to be a “virtual” firm at this point?

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Oh, right, the way lawyers can keep 80 percent of their fees.

But putting that admittedly important detail aside, how are virtual law firms really all that different, in terms of work product, from the way traditional firms have operated for years.

As Forest explains, the bulk of a traditional Biglaw lawyer’s work day is spent working with attorneys on different floors, in different cities, and at different firms. The law firm was already moving toward what we call “virtual” already… only with higher commercial lease outlays. We only needed a little bit of a push to get to a model where technology replaced even that small portion of daily face-to-face communication. As Reidy put it, “The pandemic proved the model can work but the need for it has been there.”

“I wouldn’t trade my experience at an Am Law 50 firm, but there are room for different approaches,” Reidy said. “50 percent of service professionals considering a change,” he said citing a recent survey, “not because they don’t want to work it’s that they want to explore alternatives.” Of all the reasons to develop alternative paths to practice, Reidy makes a point of flagging is the impact that the old face time model has had on representation and diversity in the workplace.

But the pandemic also proved that most people do crave the sort of community that virtual working doesn’t necessarily encourage. While loneliness is bad enough as a mental health factor, the strength of the law firm model is collaboration and cross-promotion, and virtual work can easily slip into siloed work. Of all of Scale LLP’s efforts to evolve the virtual law firm, its approach to maintaining community might be the most consequential for the long-term success of the model.

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“We’re built with attorneys in mind,” Forest explains. “We put a heavy emphasis on community and getting to know and trust one another.” To make that happen, the firm employs full-time staff focused on building the community. Virtual meetings, celebrations, events, smaller “elevator meets” are run to get the attorneys to feel connected and build real relationships. It seems to be working. “Last year, half of all work was on someone else’s client.” That’s exactly the kind of collaboration and cross-promotion that virtual firms aren’t expected to have.

So maybe, by next year, Scale LLP will have shown us that there’s no need to tag firms with the “virtual” label any more and we can just call them all “law firms.”

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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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