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A Nip Here, a Tuck There and, Voila! A Global Firm
California firms reposition themselves for the international market
By Pamela McClintock
California Law Week/Cal Law
June 21, 1999
A makeover is never psychically easy, to say nothing of the possible physical pain. Surgery, dye-jobs, piercings- they can hurt. With far different considerations, deciding how to take on a new, hipper persona can be just as difficult for a large law firm.
Hipper, in the case of the large law firm, obviously has nothing to do with a visit to the plastic surgeon or a holistic health spa. Rather, it's about obliterating a traditional geographical hierarchy and becoming one big, happy family: A global clan. And just as soccer moms are increasingly heading for the tattoo parlor, many firms are opting to put on an international face.
Take a firm like Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins. Whoops. Rather, a firm like Latham & Watkins. Period. A firm that wants to be known as a national firm, not as a Los Angeles firm with branch offices, but as a network of locations equal in stature and strength.
Bob Dell, Latham's chairman, points out that most Latham attorneys don't work in California. The firm has more than 950 lawyers, about 500 located outside the Sunshine State. There are about 260 attorneys in the downtown Los Angeles office, and about 140 in the San Diego and Orange County offices.
"Yes, the firm was founded in L.A., but from a business perspective, that's become relatively irrelevant," says Dell, who is stationed in Latham's San Francisco office, with another 80 or so attorneys.
Latham isn't the only firm trying to make this paradigm shift. Such firms include Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, O'Melveny & Myers, and Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. Likewise for what were once San Francisco's Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. The majority of attorneys working for these firms still practice in California, but out-of-state numbers are steadily climbing.
Tower Snow Jr., Brobeck chairman, says the firm has more than a solid national presence, since at least half of gross revenues are coming from out-of-state clients. "I don't care how other law firms perceive us. It's better for us if they perceive us as a regional firm," Snow says. "The clients already have the perception that we are national."
Recently, Snow led a video conference with staff from various offices. At one point during the high-tech, brown-bag lunch, one staffer referred to the firm's Austin, Texas, "satellite" office. Snow jumped in, emphatically saying none of the firm's eight other domestic offices and one overseas office is to be considered a branch of the San Francisco site. It's not just semantic hairsplitting, either.
"He is trying in a very public forum to say we are all one big firm," says Allen Whitescarver, director of marketing at Brobeck.
Firms like Brobeck and Latham are thus becoming more and more serious about eliminating references like headquarter office and branch locations. In fact, on a chart accompanying a recent survey by the New York Law Journal, Latham declined to list a headquarters in the corresponding column.
Yes, Latham has come a long way - in spirit and substance - from the two-attorney office opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1934 by Dana Latham and Paul Watkins. Its successful New York office alone has about 220 attorneys. "One way to look at it is, 'Where is the center of gravity?' You look at us, there is no clear center of gravity," says Dell. In the next two weeks, Latham will launch a renovated Web page to express the firm's broader identity, says Jolene Overbeck, director of client relations at Latham. "Right now, the front page [of the Web site] focuses on key practice areas. The new page will have a more cohesive message," she says.
Yet even now, a visit to Latham's Web page or those of Brobeck and Orrick reveals a subtle net of buzzwords pointing to the shift - phrases such as "national network of offices," "collective experience," "electronically linked offices" or "integrated legal services." "At least for Latham, the period when one was really regionally and locally focused doesn't represent the work we do any longer," says Overbeck. "The work has changed. The clients are looking for a particular niche. In our tier of the market, clients are looking for firms who can put together a team of lawyers."
Brobeck's Whitescarver agrees. "We service most of our clients with multi-office teams. Let's say there are three partners on a case, one from Austin, one from New York and one from Silicon Valley - paratroopers of sorts." Technology can make physical distance almost a moot point, says Whitescarver. "It sure doesn't feel like someone in New York is 3,000 miles away," he says.
Speaking of the Big Apple, Orrick has more attorneys in its New York office than in its once-upon-time, center-of-the-universe San Francisco office. It's been a double-edged sword for Ralph Baxter Jr., chairman of Orrick, who's had to assure the troops in the San Francisco office that the power hasn't shifted to the East Coast, while at the same time promote the firm as a national force.
Baxter himself keeps his home office in San Francisco, although the New York business requires a large chunk of East Coast time. Wesley Howell Jr., Gibson's managing partner, is stationed in New York, while the chairman of Paul, Hastings, John McGeeney, is in the Stamford, Conn., office.
Of course, there are still plenty of law firms that still call Los Angeles home, pure and simple. One is Irell & Manella, an entertainment firm that has steadfastly resisted spreading outside of Southern California. The firm, with about 200 attorneys, has its headquarter office in Century City and two other offices in downtown L.A. and in Orange County.
"We're based in Southern California, but we have clients from all over the place. I think a firm can have 59 far-flung offices and still have a headquarter office, just as a large corporation does," says Morgan Chu, co-managing partner of Irell. Chu speculates that firms with substantial roots elsewhere may be faced with morale issues, hence the need to promote the firm as a unified force, with all offices being equal.
"That is probably what they are wrestling with. People don't want to feel like they are in a 'satellite' office, especially since some of these offices are as big or bigger than the original, headquarter office," says Chu, a litigator. "I'm glad we don't have to worry about it. I think lawyers spend far too much time worrying about such things."
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