Seyfarth works to broaden its brand and its reach

CHICAGO — For nearly a decade, Seyfarth Shaw has been seeking to recast its strong brand name as a Chicago-based labor and employment law firm into one of a geographically broad-based, full-service firm.

Through three mergers since 2000, the firm has built a presence in real estate and corporate work and has nearly doubled its attorney head count to 750, deepening its presence in Atlanta, Boston and Chicago.

Still, nearly 40% of the firm’s revenue and attorneys are tied to labor and employment, and the firm has virtually no international presence.

While Seyfarth Chairman Stephen Poor is pleased with the progress the firm has made in its transformation, he acknowledges the campaign to diversify isn’t completed. Poor, who is based in Chicago and was previously chairman of the labor and employment group, is determined to keep growing, particularly internationally, and is sorting through options for achieving those goals, he said.

“There are tremendous opportunities out there, but we also have seen firms taking missteps, and we’re trying to learn from that,” Poor said in a recent interview.

A merger with Squire?

One of the options the firm is exploring is a merger with Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, people familiar with the talks between the firms have said. While Seyfarth has nine U.S. offices and just a single one-person outpost in Brussels, Squire Sanders has 15 U.S. offices, nine in Europe and four each in Asia and Latin America. Poor declined to comment on merger possibilities.

While Seyfarth has kept up its growth pattern, such as by snapping up nine finance, real estate and corporate lawyers from Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal’s Los Angeles office early last month, it hasn’t opened a new office since the launch of its Boston office in 1999, and it hasn’t swallowed any smaller firms since 2003.

Consultants and legal recruiters say the firm has had a tough time building as strong a brand name in practice areas other than labor and employment, even though it has added some healthy practice groups. That has been especially true outside Chicago, they said.

“The blessing and the curse of having a really strong practice area is that it’s really difficult to lose that moniker,” said John Cashman, a Chicago recruiter at Major, Lindsey & Africa.

Seyfarth has for decades been known as a labor and employment firm and counts even other law firms among its clients in that area, including Chicago’s Kirkland & Ellis.

Generally, the labor and employment practice area has held up well in the current U.S. economic downturn and stands to pick up as litigation rises amid the turmoil, Cashman said.

Seyfarth doesn’t charge labor and employment rates as high as some of its larger rivals in the area, such as Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, but it’s also not offering services at the lower rates of a Jackson Lewis or a Littler Mendelson, Cashman said.

Seyfarth would rather be commanding rates of the larger rivals, in the $600 per hour realm as opposed to its own high $400s to low $500s, he said.

Larger platform

To do that, the firm may need to offer clients a larger platform. In its efforts to diversify and grow, Seyfarth has developed a strong real estate department and an underrated middle-market corporate practice, Cashman said.

Seyfarth’s employee benefits practice has also grown from a “side line” of labor and employment to become a national practice, said Chris Percival, a recruiter at Chicago Legal Search.

Poor is proud to say that the firm is probably better known in Boston for its real estate practice than for its labor and employment work. Expansion of the corporate, real estate and intellectual property practice areas is part of the firm’s ongoing diversification campaign, he said.

“We take a long view of the business,” Poor said. “We are still in the market for high-quality people to continue on our path.”

This article originally appeared online Nov. 6.