Hogan Lovells Cadwalader officially launched July 1, and firm leadership has wasted no time telling anyone who’ll listen how smoothly the integration is going.
Just this week, Law.com’s American Lawyer reported the firm is moving fast on its Washington, D.C., integration too, naming office leadership as part of a plan to combine the two legacy footprints quickly rather than let the process drag.
And CEO Miguel Zaldivar has been on a bit of a victory lap. Talking to Bloomberg Law about the firm’s growth ambitions in New York, he made clear he sees the merger as the beginning, not the end, of a growth story. “Having over 300 lawyers in New York makes you a top 25 or top 27 firm on Wall Street, but this is only a step in the right direction,” he said. “With the Cadwalader name coming back to life in such a meaningful way, we’re going to grow more in New York. We’re already attracting more and more talent.”
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Growth talk, new office leadership, an ambitious CEO doing press — everything about the public rollout of Hogan Lovells Cadwalader has been engineered to project confidence and momentum.
But according to Above the Law tipsters, the view from the associate ranks tells a different story, at least when it comes to timekeeping.
An email sent to timekeepers and obtained by ATL instructs legacy Cadwalader employees to go back and review every time entry from January through June — six months’ worth — as part of the systems integration.
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As one tipster put it to ATL, “Can you imagine Cadwalader employees having to check 6 months work of 6 minute increment time entries? WTF.”
There are a helluva lot of time entries in six months, each one now apparently subject to a retroactive audit because the legacy firms’ systems didn’t talk to each other cleanly.
The combined firm has settled on HLC Intapp as its unified timekeeping system, and while the internal communication describes it as “similar to the Cadwalader version,” it notes there are differences significant enough to require action. The first two weeks of July have been devoted to training sessions to get timekeepers up to speed on the new platform. But training is just the start, legacy Cadwalader timekeepers have been given a deadline of July 20 to go back through all of their entries in the new system and confirm everything transferred over correctly.
It’s a reminder that “largest law firm merger in history” headlines are one thing, and getting two firms’ back-office systems to actually function as one is another.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1