Biglaw Firms Ditching Russian Government Clients Because It's The Right Move

Sometimes client service involves walking away.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Ergogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Sochi

(Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

There are a lot of Biglaw firms working for the Russian government and its affiliated questionably private sector entities. Personally, I represented Russian government entities when I worked as an associate at Cleary. When a country does business on the global stage, they’re going to need lawyers and they’re going to hire Biglaw.

But with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the world is rallying to cut off his access to the services that keep his regime running. And, in no small part, Biglaw firms representing the government, its banks, and its oligarchs perform a huge role in Putin’s continued viability.

Sidley Austin and Venable quickly announced that they would drop their Russian bank clients. Baker McKenzie is in the process of withdrawing from its relationships right now. Freshfields and White & Case represent VTB in ongoing litigations complicating their ability to drop the client on a dime. Neither firm provided a comment to Bloomberg Law. [UPDATE: White & Case has begun the process of extricating itself from the case.]

What about the rest of Biglaw? At least 19 firms have offices in Russia, and it’s highly unlikely those firms run on purely non-government work.

Lawyers like to drape themselves in sanctimony and repeat that “everyone deserves a lawyer,” which may be true, but not everyone deserves you to be their lawyer. The lawyer as professional and the lawyer as businessperson are two different entities and the former doesn’t eclipse the latter. Lawyers make decisions all the time about what work they take on.

Law firms are brands. For criminal defense firms, taking on social pariahs is the whole point. Delivering for unpopular clients (whether their unpopularity is fair or not) is critical to the firm’s appeal to future clients. Other firms need to respect that the clients they serve have serious concerns about optics. Disney doesn’t want anyone even casually connecting them to war criminals. Protecting their corporate image is part of client service.

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And it doesn’t hurt that the attorneys that firms work so hard to recruit are also interested in knowing if they’re about to don a violent albatross by heading to a specific firm.

So as the days go by, we keep our eyes on these firms and, maybe just as importantly, marquee clients. Because firms that don’t swiftly move to distance themselves from Russian entities are going to start hearing from clients about why.


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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