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Litigation Partners' Exodus Continues From Clifford Chance
The American Lawyer
December 03, 2008
Sibling publication Legal Week reports that four Clifford Chance New York-based litigation partners are in talks to defect to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
The departures come only weeks after Bingham McCutchen hired three antitrust and regulatory partners from the firm's Washington, D.C., office, and a month after Clifford Chance announced the termination of 20 U.S. litigation and dispute resolution associates in its New York and D.C. offices, citing a lack of work in the area.
According to Legal Week, litigator James Moyle has agreed to join Morgan Lewis with colleagues Warren Feldman, David Meister and John Carroll (the former head of the firm's U.S. operations) in talks with Skadden.
Reports indicate that the decline of the British pound against the dollar is plaguing the Magic Circle firm's U.S. partners, as well as the time-honored dispute over whether certain partners should be paid above lockstep.
Ever since Clifford Chance's merger with Rogers & Wells in May 1999, the international firm has struggled to bridge the cultural gap between its European and American lawyers. (The American Lawyer's Susan Beck profiled the firm's integration issues in this December 2004 feature story.)
The eat-what-you-kill mentality at Rogers & Wells, a firm with a prominent U.S. litigation practice, couldn't have been a worse fit with Clifford Chance's lockstep system. After the announcement of the merger, the combined entity suffered a spate of departures, with lawyers from Rogers & Wells' Paris office decamping for Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel and several high-profile litigators leaving for Kaye Scholer.
One former Clifford Chance partner famously told the New York Law Journal's Anthony Lin in this March 2005 story that the firm's European-centric business approach was "socialist," and thus ill-suited to retaining "more entrepreneurial and individualistic" American lawyers.
"In Europe, clients really do hire the firm," the former lawyer said. "In America, they hire the individual lawyers."
Clifford Chance seemed to be learning from the mistakes of its initial U.S. foray in recent years by riding a high on the pound/dollar currency conversion to take to the lateral market, The American Lawyer's Vivia Chen reported in this February 2008 feature story.
But the latest wave of defections figures to dredge up old wounds once again.
This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
