On Feb. 7 DLA Piper announced that it had hired James Wareham, the former head of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker‘s global litigation practice. The next day, in an article about law firms luring star attorneys to their firms by offering outsize salaries, The Wall Street Journal reported that at DLA, Wareham “will make about $5 million a year, a significant raise from his pay at Paul Hastings.”
What is DLA getting for its money? Wareham “checked a number of boxes for us,” DLA Piper global chairman Francis Burch tells The Am Law Daily. “We saw [him] as a game-changing-type addition to the firm. … I expect him to be doing really sophisticated lawyering involving top clients.” DLA brought in the Washington, D.C.–based partner, Burch says, to help the firm build up, among other things, its cross-border investigations and international arbitration practice.
