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New Jersey Branch of Wolf Block Hopes to Survive Firm's Implosion
New Jersey Law Journal
March 30, 2009
Leaders of Wolf Block's 67-lawyer Roseland, N.J., operation will try to keep the office intact as a separate entity or by merging en masse with another firm, managing partner John Fanburg said Tuesday.
The day after partners at Philadelphia headquarters and in branches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts voted to dissolve the 290-lawyer firm because of economic conditions, lawyers in the Roseland office met about their future and fielded inquiries from other firms, Fanburg says.
"We're looking at a number of options," Fanburg says. "There has been a tremendous response from the attorney community both locally, regionally and nationally in interest in us."
"One option is to reform as a stand-alone firm and the other option is to consider the many phone calls we have received over the past couple of days," he says.
Fanburg and most of the other partners in the firm have experience as a midsize New Jersey firm. They were in Brach, Eichler, Rosenberg, Silver, Bernstein, Hammer & Gladstone, which Wolf Block acquired in 2003. Brach Eichler had 53 lawyers at the time.
"The only decision we have reached is we want to stay together and practice together," Fanburg says.
Without giving figures, Fanburg says the Roseland office was the most profitable of Wolf Block's branches in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31 and that revenue per lawyer increased from the 2007 fiscal year.
Meanwhile, revenue per lawyer in the entire firm dropped by about 3.3 percent from 569,000 in 2007 and profits firmwide fell 18.5 percent, according to The American Lawyer magazine's most recent survey of the largest U.S. firms.
Attempts in recent months to find suitors for the entire firm failed, and practice groups had begun to splinter off, particularly in Philadelphia, even before Monday's vote to dissolve.
A large number of lawyers outside the Roseland office were heading for such firms as Cozen O'Connor in Philadelphia and Drinker Biddle in Wilmington.
Fanburg says there have been no defections from the Roseland office. And though he says he is not sure how all the partners in Roseland voted Monday on the dissolution referendum, "If I had to guess I would say it was unanimous."
He declines to identify firms that called on Tuesday, but he names several practice areas that have been strong: litigation, private client services, employment law, family law, health care and tax appeals, mostly for commercial property owners.
"We have a huge real estate tax appeal practice and that's humming along at a significant pace," he says. "The filing deadline is April 1, and we're filing a significant number this year, probably more than we have ever done."
He says the firm isn't interested in shedding any lawyers and that leaders of the firm met with lawyers throughout the day to keep them informed about offers. "At the moment, everybody is pretty committed to staying together," he says.
He adds, however, "I haven't asked anyone to take a loyalty oath."
Back in 2003, it took nine months for Brach Eichler and Wolf Block to work out their merger, after a tentative first meeting.
"It was strictly a courtesy meeting because we had come off a good year and we were not interested in merging with any firm," real estate partner Alan Hammer said in a New Jersey Law Journal interview at the time. "But we were impressed with those guys and quickly went from uninterested to interested."
Now, Hammer says that if the office becomes a stand-alone firm there is a good chance it will revert to the Brach Eichler name.
"I started work with this firm in 1970," Hammer says. "I'm not anxious to be somewhere else. Many partners have been here for their whole careers. We never thought this would happen. We've got a good group of people and we're just trying to keep them together."
In 2001, Wolf Block opened a Cherry Hill, N.J., office by acquiring 12-lawyer Kozlov, Seaton, Romanini, Brooks & Greenberg, and it has since grown to 25 attorneys.
