David Boies
We recently drew your attention to a seemingly offhand comment made by Jonathan Schiller, co-founder and managing partner of Boies Schiller & Flexner, in an interesting interview with David Parnell for Forbes. Schiller suggested that the litigation powerhouse would, sooner or later, part ways with its small but successful corporate practice.
Make that sooner. This just in, from the American Lawyer:
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Paul Hastings is poised to hire the bulk of Boies Schiller Flexner’s corporate group as the firm winds down the practice.
“I think this was a very successful move,” firm chairman David Boies said Tuesday. “It enables the corporate group to better serve their clients and I think they’ll continue to expand and grow with a corporate platform that has a greater scope and scale. At the same time, it will enable the firm to concentrate on its litigation practice, which has always been [its] core.”
This is why the move makes such sense. As discussed yesterday, Biglaw firms are focusing on their cores with all the avidity of Pilates students. And the transactional practice at BSF, accounting for about 10 percent of the firm’s revenues, was never its center of gravity.
Boies Schiller had been mulling over the fate of its corporate practice for about a year. Here’s how the deal came together:
Two months ago the Boies Schiller lawyers preparing to depart retained Laura Corrao, Robin Miller and Lauren Wiesenthal—name partners at New York-based recruiting firm Corrao Miller Wiesenthal Legal Search Consultants Inc.—to help refine their search. Within five weeks, Paul Hastings emerged as the leading candidate to acquire the group, something that Boies Schiller partner Robert Leung attributes to the firm’s strong energy practice in Houston, as well as its sports, media, entertainment and technology capacity in California.
“We decided that we needed to really grow to a much large critical mass and to have a bigger platform with much broader transactional capabilities to compete in this ever competitive marketplace,” Leung said. “So we’re definitely excited at the new challenges and the opportunity to work with all the folks at Paul Hastings [and] to continue what we have been doing.”
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Rob Leung, by the way, is one major reason I’ve been aware for quite some time of the Boies Schiller corporate practice (which not everyone knew about, given the firm’s focus on litigation). He’s my fellow Yale Law grad and a prominent figure within the Asian-American legal community, having served as president of the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) in 2010.
The BSF partners moving to Paul Hastings in New York include Robert Leung, Mike Huang, Stefan dePozsgay, Jason Hill, and Russell Franklin. They will be joined by several associates. Christopher Boies, son of David Boies and head of the practice, will be going in-house to a client of Boies Schiller. (As noted by Am Law, other BSF deal lawyers have already found new homes — six in South Florida have moved over to Pillsbury Winthrop, to launch a Miami office, and Covington & Burling recently picked up transactional tax partner Ansgar Simon as of counsel in New York.
Congratulations to Boies Schiller Flexner, Paul Hastings, and the dealmakers making this move. Boies Schiller is used to winning, and this deal sounds like a win-win for all involved.
Paul Hastings to Pick Up Boies Schiller Corporate Group [American Lawyer]
Paul Hastings Accelerates Cross-Border Transactional Growth with Addition of M&A Team in New York [Paul Hastings (press release)]
Earlier: On The Future Of Boies Schiller
David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].